


Jeeves & the Blue Train

by okapi



Category: CHRISTIE Agatha - Works, Jeeves & Wooster, Jeeves - P. G. Wodehouse
Genre: Accidental Drug Use, Agatha Christie - Freeform, Anal Plug, Anal Sex, Anxious Bertie, BAMF Bertie, BAMF Jeeves, Competent Bertram "Bertie" Wooster, Crossovers & Fandom Fusions, Drag, Established Jooster, Established Relationship, Feels, Hurt/Comfort, M/M, No Hercule Poirot, Oral Sex, Other Additional Tags to Be Added, Rimming, Sexual Roleplay, Smut (Chapter 3 & 6), The Mystery of the Blue Train, casefic
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-05-01
Updated: 2018-05-07
Packaged: 2019-04-30 18:58:27
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 12
Words: 45,420
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14503425
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/okapi/pseuds/okapi
Summary: A doomed American heiress. A cursed ruby.  A millionaire's train where every berth harbours a secret—except the two that've got London's typical man-about-town and his gentleman's bally personal gentleman.Bertie Wooster & Jeeves take Agatha Christie'sBlue Trainand find themselves in the royalbouillon!Rated for Chapter 3 & 6, which is are PWP Intermissions. The casefic itself is Teen.Crossover. Casefic (without Poirot). Hurt/Comfort feels. Established Jooster.





	1. Chapter 1

Feeling myself too drained to do a proper encore of “I Wish I Could Shimmy Like My Sister Kate,” I relaxed the warbler and let the sponge that had been scouring the Wooster frame slip from my grip and splash into the steaming verbena-scented bath-sluice.

“Speak, that I might see thee, Jeeves.”

Though aiming for a morning chirrup, I confess that what escaped the lips fell short of ‘lark-like,’ more closely resembling that of a nest-bound nightingale giving his pal the lark the weary ‘what ho!’ at change of shift.

Nevertheless, the shot was on the board.

“Yes, sir?”

Jeeves didn’t just speak, of course, he also floated in, looking as fresh as a dewy violet, with one of his Specials on a tray.

Oh, those Specials! Like their creator, they move in mysterious ways their wonders to perform. I’m quite certain there’s more to the divine elixir than meat sauce, yolk of raw egg, and red pepper. For how else can it be explained that after croaking a _cin-cin_ and tossing the toil and trouble down the hatch, the Wooster lion from the previous night’s bacchanal was tamed to a wee ewe lamb _and_ the sleeping tiger required for the long day ahead was awakened? Impossible to explain how both conditions could be realised by imbibing a single libation. I’m left to conclude that Jeeves is simply as bally a Houdini with cocktails as he is with everything else.

But back to my story.

When the rabbits had been pulled out of the hat and the jigsaw pieces of my skull had exploded, then reassembled themselves ‘round the ol’ lemon, I was at liberty to proclaim,

“Regarding the raiment for the day, Jeeves, ‘debonair,’ I think, is the _mot juste_.”

“Indeed, sir. As we shall be traveling on the ‘Millionaire’s Train,’ there could scarcely be another.”

“Well, sail the master way down upon the soigné river, what?”

“Very good, sir.”

He shimmered out, no doubt to do to improve the shining hour by readying the trunks for imminent departure and the residence for prolonged vacancy, for the time had arrived for Jeeves and I to flock together with the other birds of our inimitable featherage and head south for the winter, January and February in London being what you might call a circle of the Inferno that Dante thought too horrific to mention in his little travel guide.

The approaching migration was at the root of the couple of irregularities to the usual order of things at 3A Berkley Mansions, Berkley Square, London W.1 this morning. The first deviation from the norm was that I’d been slung from sheets at an hour when the snail was still on the thorn. The Wooster visage rarely greets the grey dawn. My giving the glad-eye to anything before a civilized ten o’clock could only mean that the pride of the crusading ancestors had no alternative but to suffer the barbarism of having to catch a train to catch a boat to catch a train.

The second anomaly was Jeeves’s ‘Yes, sir.’ Now you might be saying to yourself, what’s so odd about that? But you see, Jeeves is my man and, also, _my man_. The personal in the gentleman’s personal gentleman is, these days, well, bally personal. And now, when it’s just two men of iron wills living in close quarters, viz. when Jeeves and I are at home alone together, it’s his custom to allow for a pregnant, if that’s the word I want, and given the circs. I’m not certain it is, rest where the ‘sir’ note might otherwise be heard. It is a place-holder, if you will, and when he and I are in mixed company or when we take the Wooster and Jeeves show to the provinces or, say, the sunny Riviera, we revert to our former, more feudal ways.

Thus, ‘Yes, sir’ and ‘Indeed, sir’ were a rehearsal for the bowler as well as the batsman, but the accompanying twitch of that beautiful Viking mouth meant that previous evening’s events were still fresh in Jeeves’s mind—and that he was still quite bucked about his ‘bon voyage’ gift.

And so it was that I fished a proud sponge from the bathwater and resumed my ablutions with a smile, for if a curious, convalescing observer with nothing better to do were to take up ink and quill and craft a list of the limitations of Bertram Wilberforce Wooster, it might be long and colourful one, but such an inventory would never include a failure to take care of his nearest and dearest, and with a brainy cove like Jeeves, you’ve got to see to the neck-up, the ‘little grey cells’ as it were, as well as the rest of the handsome corpus. And it just so happened that on the previous day, I’d had a bit of _coup_ when it came to taking care of Jeeves.

Oh, I must hasten to add something here. I don’t know if you aren’t already aware, but on long train journeys like the one that was looming on the Wooster and Jeeves horizon, superior reading material is absolutely essential. You need something thoroughly absorbing to make the tedious hours vanish like a lady in box—not the one sawed in half, of course, the other one.

A good book also serves as an excellent barrier if you happen to end up next to a sleeping tablet, you know, one of those old Majors who served as sentry on the outer fencepost of the Empire for about a century and can’t wait to show you a scar and tell you the whole story about judging a bonny baby competition in Peru and getting a native dagger in the pin from one of the deadlier-than-the-male set. I mean, don’t get me wrong, the first time it’s a corking yarn, but, trust me, you’ll hear the whole Jungle Book, plus Gunga Din’s biography a dozen times before you reach your destination if you don’t raise the ol’ dust jacket and issue a firm, but silent _nolle prosequi_ to further raconteuring.

Now my own taste in literature leans toward a thrilling _roman policier_ , as our Gallic neighbours call them, but naturally, Jeeves, with his fish-fueled, bulging-at-the-back brain, puts his fiver on a different filly. He once asked me to pick him up a book by a chap by the name of Spinoza, and I was determined to surprise him on the eve of our trip with something just as fruity.

It was, therefore, with the keeper of the Wooster heart, home, and wardrobe in mind that I embarked on a quest for a bookshop that had been recommended to me by my pal Bingo Little, he being married to the novelist Rosie M. Banks and therefore having a toe well-dipped in London’s literary paddle pool.

After something between an Easter egg hunt and a crusade for the Holy Grail, I found it, a little shingle-less Bohemian place hidden on a side street and nowhere near Piccadilly Circus as Bingo had led me to believe.

I crossed the threshold, bell on the door jangling to herald my arrival, and was immediately coshed up the nose by that savory perfume _eau de old books_. The space was small and cramped, and the shelves climbed to the firmament, heavy with platoons of spines on display.

This Bodleian, though about the square footage of an outhouse, inspired confidence.

I sauntered about, giving the place a careful east-to-west, and as far as I could tell there were plenty of words, words, words, all written down and bound for the purchasing, but the only sign of life was the Johnnie at desk. He was a round, solid fellow, dressed in solemn shades of browns. His face wore a blank expression, like that of a potato that had been pondering all day whether it ought to be mashed, baked, or sautéed and had finally given up the ghost and decided to wait for the blight to set in. And he was old, so old that his most notable achievement must have been setting type for Gutenberg himself. All to say, the fellow inspired less confidence than his emporium.

Nevertheless, I approached at a swagger and gave a spirited salute.

“What ho within, my fine bookseller! I am looking for a gift for a friend. He’s potty about this bird Spinoza, philosophical chap, don’t you know, and I want to get him something Spinoza-esque. Like Spinoza, but not Spinoza, if you catch me. Got any corkers like that?”

Now as I was launching my question, I noticed that the shelves just behind this page-peddler were filled not with books, but rather curios, _objets d’arte_ , and other dust-catching thingagummies. It was a collection to make the most eccentric Hans Sloane proud, and I can best illustrate just how odd it was when I say that perched on the shelf at the level this cove’s shoulder was a porcelain toad in a pink and yellow sundress holding a straw bonnet. It was the kind of thing that would’ve easily beat out a statuette of the Infant Samuel at Prayer in the ‘what Aunt Dahlia would throw first in a fit of rage’ contest. It was hideously charming and charmingly hideous, sort of like a silver cow creamer but with less purpose in life, and I’ll be hanged if this Johnnie hadn’t sat for the sculptor because, minus the costumery, the resemblance was remarkable. But I didn’t remark on it because I was still waiting for a response to my query, hope dimming with every accordion squeeze of the lungs.

But just when I was about to abort mission, the chap stirred. Bending the elbow, he retrieved something from his pocket. It was a monocle, you know, one of those gold-framed bits of glass on a string, sort of like a pince-nez, but where one half has decided it can’t stick it at any price and fixed a note to the pin-cushion.

Well, this tuber set the lens in his amphibious eye, and, would you believe, in an instant, he was transformed! Gone was any vestige of rotting root vegetable, and in its place a vibrant, stately gentleman with the air of one of who knows his business quite well, thank you very much. I mean to say, now, he looked like a cross between an Oxford don and a favourite uncle, you know, the kind that’s oofy to the gills but would never dream of cutting off your monthly allowance just because you wanted to marry a chorus girl.

With a wave of his unwebbed hand, the chap bid me follow, and I realised that I had erred in my initial appraisal of the establishment. It was not small, it was _narrow_. I was led back along a passageway of connecting rooms lined from floor-to-roof-tree with bookshelves. As we crossed thresholds, there were even archways of books overhead. Soon we were passing so deep into this One-Hundred Volume Woods that I lamented the lack of bread crumbs in my pocket. There seemed no reason or rhyme to most of the chambers, but one must’ve been dedicated to the great civilizations of the Nile, for there was a mummified crocodile to step over and a glass-and-bronze ibis roosting overhead, the latter fixing me with a hard stare that said he’d just woke up and decided it was high time he’d got that curse business up and running again.

Finally, my guide stopped and plucked a book from a shelf.

The heart leapt. A tip from a discriminating bibliophile: the best books invariably have blue covers. I recognised the name writ in faded gold. I even remembered the punch.

“Is this the one about the single swallow not making a summer?” I asked, flipping through the pages, which exhaled the pungent aroma of Methuselah’s armpit.

“Yes, sir. Exceedingly rationale.”

“Well, that’s my friend in a nutshell, if you add a bit of genius at everything from pressing trousers to launching me out of the royal _bouillon_ every fortnight.” I shut the book with a satisfied _thup_. “Sold.”

The man nodded.

Being a gambler, the decision to double-down with this fellow was, for me, the work of a moment.

“I say, do you happen to have anything modern ‘round here? I, unlike my friend, prefer something that’s spent a bit less time in Nefertiti’s stocking drawer. Something along the lines of Rex West’s _Mystery of the Pink Crayfish_. You see, I’m going on a long trip tomorrow, and not being much of a diarist, I, well, you know how it goes, nothing sensational to read on the train, what?”

The bookseller gave his chin a thoughtful massage. Then we filed back from whence we’d come. He was determined as Moses to lead the way, but not, or so it seemed to the Wooster child of Israel, to the land of milk and topping goosefleshers.

I was just about to offer a polite ‘not quite, thanks all the same’ when he raised his staff, or rather that still- surprisingly-unwebbed hand of his and…

_WHAM!_

The bally wall, books and all, swung ‘round!

“Right, ho!” I cried, realising that, like Jeeves, this fellow, too, had a _lapin_ or two ensconced in his _chapeau_.

These volumes were few, but they made up for their limited numbers in style, each looking like a positive corker, hot off the presses. My concierge selected one, and it was love at first sight: a rhapsody in dark blue with shiny silver letters.

_DEATH ON A TRAIN!_

Of course, it was the gasper at the end that did it. I mean to say, _Death on a Train_ is probably a fine read, but for something called _DEATH ON A TRAIN!_ you order the new sponge-bag trousers and gardenia.

I did, however, suffer a breath’s hold-the-line when I glanced at the first page.

“Okapi Opsimath?”

“A _nom de plume_ ,” explained my companion.

It was, no doubt, as the bird said, but why anyone would voluntary give themselves the name of something requiring a Harley Street specialist was a mystery I’d prefer to remain unsolved.

“It’s the author’s inaugural work.”

This was good news. I suppose every genre has its quirks, but, as anyone who has consumed as many detective novels as I have could tell you, after spinning yarn after yarn of the right stuff even the brainiest authors lose their tabasco. Sometimes they even go so far as to take the best bits from their earlier stories, cram them into a patty pan, cover them with mashed potatoes, and pop them into the oven, hoping their reading public will scarf the dish down greedily without comment.

No one comments, of course, but everyone _knows_.

I perused a few pages and ejaculated, in the Victorian way,

“Hello, hello, hello!”

The old thing was illustrated!

I mean to say, drawings, too? For drawings, I’d have to brush up on my Wedding Glide!

I stared at the picture. There, in black and white, was the amateur detective, bending over the body of the unluckiest of damsels in a sleeping berth. And there were the police, a constable and an inspector, and some sort of train Johnnie, giving the detective the same look that the lads in the boat gave Jesus when they woke him up to tell him that it was time for all good tempest-rebukers to come to aid of the party.

But the scene, compelling as it was, wasn’t the most arresting part. No, the bit that caught my eye was that the detective, save for two points, looked exactly like the last of the Woosters! There was the sangfroid and the shrewdness! There was the willowy frame wrapped in Saville Row! It was like that thing about Sargent and his capturing the soul, don’t you know, with the brushstroke, or pen-stroke, or whatever-stroke. I mean to say, it was bally uncanny. I said a prayer that this bloke’s name wasn’t something barmy like Lord Tuberculosis, younger son of the Duke of Spots-on-Chest because he was beginning to grow on me.

Now as braced as I was about the Wooster blood in this Sherlock Holmes, I had to admit there were two important differences between this fictional sleuth-hound and self. First, at least in this illustration, there was no Watson in a size twelve hat peering over Holmes’s shoulder to ensure no vital clues were missed—I know Jeeves says he wears an eight, but that can’t possibly be true, the man’s a genius. The second difference was that this detective was sporting a monocle, just like my new pal the oracle of bookselling, and, like the gentleman formerly known as Toad-in-Sundress, looking rather debonair doing it.

This monocle business made a chap think, but I couldn’t think for long because book business came first.

“Right, ho,” I said.

And that was that.

I confess I could scarcely look away from that porcelain toad while the books were being wrapped. I was just about to ask the Johnnie if it was modern Dutch when I realised I’d made a gross _faux pas_.

“Thanks ever so much and all that, but I say, I don’t believe I caught your name. Mine’s Wooster, by the way. Bertie Wooster.”

“I’m Without.”

“Really? Well, Mister Without—”

“Without A. Name.”

I inclined the bean, furrowed the brow, then shrugged. “Well, I suppose it worked out fine for that chap with the one-eyed monsters. Toodle-oo.”

I parted ways with the necessary needful, swept the parcels off the desk, and exited centre left, thankfully, not pursued by a bear in bathing pyjamas, a toad in a sundress, or any other animal in lax seasonal attire.

When my Oxfords hit the pavement, I turned ‘round and gave the entrance of the shop a hard stare. It was a trick that Jeeves had taught me to help me remember things, and I wanted to be able to find this place again the next time I was in the market for the written word. But as I was slotting the photograph in the mind’s album, I noticed that there was, in fact, a small sign marking the premises, just to the right of the door.

**BOOKS**

Without A. Name, _proprietor_

Aghast, I could not help murmuring something I’d once said to Jeeves,

“Golly, there is some raw work pulled at the font from time to time, is there not?”

* * *

As I strolled, I ruminated, if that’s the word I want, I think cows enter into it, on the monocle. That round piece of glass had done he of the unfortunately-monikered a world of good. It gave Lord Consumption, or whatever _his_ name was, in _DEATH ON A TRAIN!_ the appearance of Poe’s Dupin by way of Valentino. And speaking of lords, if I remember correctly, he of ‘nature, red in tooth and claw’ had sported one, too.

A monocle wasn’t something for a young Johnnie, of course, but then a glance at the calendar and a bit of subtraction or, for that matter, a glance into any freshly-washed window, was a ready reminder that Bertram wasn’t so young these days. Was it time to age like the bottles of the best in the cellar? Was it time to add a bit of an avuncularity about the soul’s porthole?

There was the age talking point, and then there was what you might call the theatrical consideration. Now, just to be fair, in all the journeys I’d made to the Côte d'Azur, there’d never been any drama, save a lost _billet de baggage_ —it wasn’t lost, of course, Jeeves had it—or a bit of _fillet de sole à la Jeanette_ on my brown lounge suit—it wasn’t there for long, naturally. But as I shuffled home, just me and my shadow strolling down the avenue, I pondered, not lonely or like a cloud, unless clouds happen to imagine themselves, from time to time, the Hercules Poirot of the condensed water vapour set, that if there were a bit trouble on a train, just a bit, you know, nothing bleak, a pearl necklace or something vanishing, and then, the cry of alarm, the moment of panic, the ‘oh, what shall we do?’ and all the heads would turn to that debonair man of the world, Bertram Wooster. And I would, of course, slip the glass into the eye and settle the whole matter with a ‘you see, it’s really quite simple.’ And everyone would gasp and gape at my cleverness.

I have to say I was quite caught up in this little fantasy of mine, so much so that when I happened upon a quite jocular ocular shop with a distinguished-looking eye-piece adorning a bust of Napoleon in the window, my fate was, much like that of certain petty tyrant at Waterloo, sealed.

* * *

Now I’ve been called a typical man-about-town, but I didn’t realise just how typical until I oozed out of the spectacle shop a half hour later, the proud owner of a smart red morocco case which held within an equally smart monocle. You see, apparently the Wooster eye sockets are, in size, shape, and depth, what everyone is wearing these days, and it was a surprisingly simple matter to fit me with my very own lens on a leash.

I liked what I saw in the mirror when I tried the monocle on and so did the kind ogle-mongers at the shop. And as neither glass, the looking-in nor the looking-through, crack’d from side to side, I considered myself on the credit side of the doom ledger and biffed off in high spirits.

I returned to an empty nest, Jeeves have, it seemed, flown the coop. He might have been on an errand of importance related to his chatelaine duties. He might have urgently found himself in need of something vital to packing up all our cares and woes. He might, in fact, have been having a stiff one with his pals at the Junior Ganymede Club, a guild of valets and butlers that meet ‘round Curzon Street way. After all, it was our last night in the metrop for about eight weeks, and I had plans myself for a raucous evening at the Drones.

I poured myself into the fish-and-soup, then fixed a brandy and splash. After that, I tickled the ivories for a spell, singing “Bye Bye Blackbird” with a robustness that was certain to result in a complaint by the Honourable Mrs. Tinkler-Moulke to the building manager as well as her personal physician. Safe in the knowledge that I’d given she of the ever-yapping Pom and the rest of the neighbours a melodious souvenir of Bertram Wooster, something to keep warm in their bosoms for the next two months, I legged it to the club.

* * *

It was quite late when I returned home. I found Jeeves in the sitting room keeping company with an improving book and a relaxing night-cap. After a polite inquiry as to my well-being, he remarked impishly, well, as impishly as Jeeves gets, which is about as impish as a garden gnome, that he wasn’t aware that it was Pantomime Night.

I adjusted the monocle and said, with the tiniest bit of hauteur, “The poet Wilde says that a flower blooms for its own joy, Jeeves.”

“The poet Wilde, though a most talented man of letters, is scarcely a reliable source of gardening advice.”

“The fur coat, Jeeves?”

“The fur coat _in England_.”

We conversed in the silent language of eyebrows for a few moments. Then I let fur coats and ye ol' Gent’s Guide to Growing Green Carnations drop and tucked my monocle into its bed for the night.

I told Jeeves that he wasn’t wrong in his original statement; it had, as it so happened, ended up being Pantomime Night, for no sooner had I modeled my new accessory for the lads, than a vote was taken and an impromptu, but nonetheless spirited, game of charades was launched.

Jeeves showed no surprise that I had been assigned Joseph Chamberlain, every officer of note in the German army as well as half a dozen coves from Gilbert and Sullivan’s oeuvre.

“A grand time was had by all, Jeeves.”

And it goes to show just how grand a time was had by Bertram that I didn’t remember my earlier purchases until Jeeves shifted noticeably—noticeably, of course, because I noticed it—in his armchair.

His beautiful blue eyes darted across the room to his gift, which was still wrapped in brown paper, keeping company with a similarly-costumed _DEATH ON A TRAIN!_ on the table at the entrance to the residence.

Oh, this Watson knew my methods all right! He’d deduced that the parcels were books and that one of the books was for him, but he hadn’t figured out what book it was, exactly. Like a gentleman and like a gentleman’s gentleman, he refused to take a liberty. But like a cat, he was curious, and charmingly so. And, also, like a cat, the one i’ the adage, to be precise, he’d sat there, who knows how long, wondering, theorising far ahead of the evidence, but letting ‘I dare not’ wait upon ‘I would.’

I presented Jeeves with his gift, and he tore off the paper with uncharacteristic haste and carelessness.

When all was revealed, his face lit like a Christmas tree, and my heart skipped like the high hills.

“Something to read on the train,” I said, smiling.

“Thank you _very_ much.”

Jeeves never calls me ‘Bertie,’ not even in our most intimate moments, but his eyes shone like he might have wished to. It is enough to indicate how overwhelmed he was that he engaged in a spot of domestic littering and let the brown paper fall to the floor.

Then he set one book atop another and closed the distance between us, those brilliant b. e.’s studying my lips as I whispered,

“Thank _you_ , Jeeves. For everything.”

* * *

I managed a mere four hours of the dreamless between the time that our mutual admiration society concluded and the last of our journey preparations commenced, and it is not hyperbole to say that those preparations began when I was rudely yanked from the sheets. Jeeves, in fact, had me by the ankles, while my claws sank into the bedclothes and an indignant, feral meow of protest escaped my maw. I hissed and sputtered and fought as any feline would, that is, any feline who found itself being wrenched from Queen Mab’s sweet embrace and hurled unceremoniously into a verbena-scented bath at that ungodly hour!


	2. Chapter 2

I sprang from the bath like Botticelli’s Venus and put myself in Jeeves’s hands, only emerging from that pair of scallop shells when I was a wonder of sartorial sleekness, clad in a grey cheviot suit, which had been carefully selected, or so Jeeves informed me, because it was heavy enough to withstand the assaults of travel, light enough not to wilt in a steam-heated train, and Ol’ Blighty enough that when the Continentals ask ‘Is he as English as his tweeds?’ the suit alone will give them the ‘right ho.’ That third bit, of course, being my own criterium.

Once dressed, I donned the monocle and preened in front of the mirror, finding myself almost as satisfied with the reflection as that drooping-flower chappie who got waylaid permanently at pond’s edge.

Debonair was, without a doubt, the _mot juste_.

“It’s not only fine feathers that make fine birds, Jeeves.”

“So I’m given to understand, sir.”

“But this morning, the not-so-young master is sporting some magnificent plumage, what?”

“You are, indeed, sir, but may I ask if you are intending to wear that—?”

Forestalling any argument, I let the scale fall from my eye and put it in its red morocco case, then cried with appropriate _espieglerie_.

“ _On y va_!”

Jeeves gave a slight, and in the circs., needlessly feudal bow.

“Yes, sir.”

And with that, we bid _adieu_ to the ol’ homestead.

* * *

We were somewhat early to Victoria as is Jeeves’s wont when embarking on one of these not-infrequent transcontinental excursions of ours. While he went to see to the luggage, I decided to do in a portion of the hour by browsing the harvest of London’s hothouse gardens and selecting a snip of fine spray for the Wooster buttonhole. This accomplished, it was off to the bookstalls.

I had just confirmed that none of the literature available to the undiscerning traveler could hold a bit of wick and wax to _Death on the Train!_ when out of the corner of my eye, I caught sight of something extraordinary.

I know in these reminiscences of mine I’ve often described the way that Jeeves moves, not the ‘mysterious ways and wonders to perform’ bit, I mean, his actual hauling himself from point A to point B. He shimmers. He floats. He oozes like a jellyfish. He slides like a tactful eel. He performs meta-physical feats like one of those birds of India who can be in Bombay in one moment and then manifest themselves in Calcutta the next. He is always silent and, at least, at first, unnoticed when he projects himself into any setting.

All true, but there is another characteristic of Jeeves in motion worth mentioning and that is when he is there, viz. when you have him in your sights, he sort of glides. He is graceful, like a Viennese waltz. Yes, he is slow, but it is not the slow of a snail, but rather the slow of a majestic lion who has already consumed his ration of antelope for the day.

What I mean to say is that Jeeves is methodical, deliberate, and calm in his movements, and I only bring it up to give an idea of just how extraordinary the next scene was.

Jeeves was moving towards me, or rather towards me and a couple of racks of also-ran goosefleshers, in much his usual manner.

Except that he was not moving slow. Quite the opposite.

He was _running_.

The first feeling that gripped me was sheer astonishment, I mean to say, it was like seeing a cheetah sprinting across Leicester Square. No one expects that, do they? It takes one aback, especially when said cheetah figures in your employ as well as your naughtiest reveries and had, only a few minutes prior, been recommending that you go with the lilac-coloured rosebud rather than your signature red for your buttonhole.

I mean, do cheetahs do that? Surely not. I mean why in heavens would nature endow them with pronounced opinions on the well-dressed gentleman’s boutonniere when spritely-moving pins, like the ones racing towards me, were much more advantageous in ensuring there was dinner on the table every night and, thus, more cheetahs in the offing?

But back to Jeeves.

So, yes, the first sensation was astonishment, but then astonishment fled and what surfaced was a slightly warmer sentiment, for one thing was certain: Jeeves looked exceedingly dashing, well, dashing.

But in the next moment, the divine p., much like its pal astonishment, cheesed it, and I was left wondering _why_ Jeeves was running. Was he running from something? Was something chasing him, like a cheetah, perhaps, who, having just blown in from out of town on the milk train and was now frightfully concerned that it’d miss the changing of the guard at Buckingham Palace?

A quick glance told me, no, that Jeeves was running _after_ something, or rather someone. His beautiful blue eyes were fixed on a young gazelle of a bloke who was leaping ‘cross the plains of the Serengeti, or rather a crowded train station.

Comprehension did a rosy-fingered dawning when I spied a _trés chic_ handbag clasped to the panting chest of Jeeves’s prey.

Oh, that poor, pitiful sap of a bag snatcher! I’d be willing to bet right about now he was ruing the morning’s decision to ply the wicked trade ‘round this little watering hole!

Pursuer and pursued were making a bee-line for the B. Wooster while shrieks of alarm went up amongst the conscripted spectators, especially those unfortunate enough to be obstacles in the course.

Amidst the chaos, however, Bertram kept his head. We Woosters do in such situations.

And there was no mistaking the assigned roles: Jeeves was the Assyrian coming down on the fold and I was the cohort gleaming in purple and gold, a cohort who just happened to have a _whangee_ that would not, as the poet Blake says, sleep in my hand.

I extended the stick at the precise moment, and the bag snatcher went down hard, base over apex. A tower of the fruitiest literature came crashing down upon him, and a smart crocodile-skin case popped up from the wreckage.

I caught the reptilian-wrapped reticule in mid-arc and tossed it to Jeeves, then cried,

“Well done, Jeeves!”

I was bursting with pride and a bit of the unmentionable warmth that I mentioned earlier.

“Thank you, sir,” he replied like a tactful eel. Gone was the cheetah. Only a delicious hint of what I believe Jeeves once called ‘the damask cheek’ betrayed his recent exertion.

And then, as if on cue, the cavalry arrived.

While a uniformed keeper of train station peace extracted the miscreant from the rubble-pile of yellow literature, two civilians approached at a concerned hurry.

The first of a plain-clothed pair was a big, broad-shouldered man with a face of chiseled granite and a hard line of a mouth. Having spent a while in New York, I recognised the type at once: his was the photo you see when you look up ‘American captain of industry’ in the dictionary. The hair peeking out of his hat was a vibrant red; at school he might have been called Carrots or Ginger, but these days I suspect no one dared to call him anything but ‘sir.’

He was accompanied by a tall, slender specimen of the delicately nurtured who, I daresay, had never worn plain clothes in her life. Even dangling on her mother’s knee, I suspect she was swaddled in the latest from Paris, for at the moment, she was sporting a long fur coat and a tiny lid of Chinese lacquer red perched atop her dark auburn curls. Hers was the face of a Raphael Madonna but something about the jaw and chin said she was a chip off the captain of industry’s tooth. I also felt memory’s faint tap on the shoulder that I knew her from somewhere.

Jeeves gave an almost imperceptible bow and gallantly handed over the bursa minor. “Madam, I believe this belongs to you.”

“Oh, thank you so much,” she breathed, looking at Jeeves as if he hung the moon and stars and a few other heavenly bodies that those poet chappies always swoon about. “Really, you have no idea how grateful I am!”

“I’m very impressed,” said the man in a deep baritone was probably accustomed to telling people to make it snappy or heads would roll. “That was some mighty quick work on your part.” He extended his hand to Jeeves. “Rufus Van Aldin. This is my daughter, Ruth.”

“My name is Jeeves,” said Jeeves, massaging the fin. “This is my employer, Mister Bertram Wooster.”

“Employer, eh?” said Van Aldin as he shook my hand in that hearty way Americans have, like they want to see if they can remove the whole business from the wrist with one squeeze and a jerk. Relief washed over me when the Wooster mitt was released with digits and opposable thumb intact.

“What is he, some kind of bodyguard?” Van Aldin added with a manly chuckle.

I didn’t look at Jeeves. He would not have been letting his smile be his umbrella, of course, but there might have been a certain something in his eye that would have made me botch my line.

“Jeeves is my valet,” I said calmly. And my lodestar, I neglected to add.

“Huh,” said Van Aldin, giving me the once over before turning to Jeeves. “Well, if you ever find you want a change, Mister Jeeves,” he took out his wallet and handed Jeeves a card, “let me know. I could use a man with your wits, and you can best believe I’d make it worth your while.”

I mean to say! The dashed nerve of these Yanks! There’s been many a bloke who’s tried to poach Jeeves from me, of course, a bird of his rare breed is bound to attract such interest, but they usually attempt their negotiations in secret. I’ve never actually been forced to witness the serpent’s work! Brazen to the core! And who’s to say that Bertram Wooster doesn’t make it amply worth Jeeves’s while, both in the contents of the weekly envelope and in boudoir supplement!

“Thank you very much, sir,” said Jeeves. “At this moment, I find myself wholly satisfied with my position.”

I had to fix my attention on the poor cove who was now trying to set to rights the racks of _There’s a Cobra Down My Chimney_ and _Lord Diddle Finds a Thumb in His Fiddle_ to avoid thinking about Jeeves’s satisfaction in a certain posish or two.

“Loyal, too, eh?” said Van Aldin. “Good man.”

“Rather!” I piped up like a man whose Peke has just taken home the blue ribbon.

I was thankful that this Van Aldin knew enough about ‘cross-the-pond etiquette not to punctuate his statement with a slosh on the back; it was something that Jeeves and I had endured a few times too many whilst we were in New York and though always performed in the spirit of the strongest camaraderie, it never ceased to momentarily discombobulate, if that’s the word I want.

I was also thankful that further conversation of the ‘buttering Jeeves up, the better for poaching’ variety was quickly brought to a halt by assaults on two fronts: from the west, there was the station rozzer raising the usual noise about statements and charges; and from the east, there appeared a tall, thin spoon of a woman, if spoons dress all in black and speak with a sort of adenoidal deference when they say,

“I have put your dressing case under your seat, Madame, in case you should need it. Shall I take the rugs, or will you require one?”

Enter lady’s maid centre left. And didn’t she look the part down to the last thread? Kudos to the costume department had to be curtailed, however, because the maid’s question brought the whole party back to the original, pre-bag snatching business.

“Dad! I’m going to miss my train!” cried she of the fur and auburn curls.

“Don’t worry, Ruthie. I’ll will attend to things here, this matter and that other business we talked about. You go and board. I’ll see you next month.”

Daughter threw her arms around father, and the latter’s iron exterior melted. Touching scene, really, but it was interrupted by a soft cough, like a sheep on a far-off meadow clearing its throat of a blade of grass.

“Sir, time is of the essence for us as well.”

Another mitt crusher and word of thanks from the Yank, and I was following Raphael’s Madonna and maid towards a waiting Pullman, but I hadn’t hoofed it two steps when I heard the baritone say,

“One moment, Mister Jeeves,”

Well, I’ll be dashed! The captain of bally industry was going to have another go at valet-snatching!

Well, he could try and good luck to him, I thought smugly. Jeeves knew which side of the bed his butter was on. Toast and marmalade, too when it came down to it.

I had reached the platform and made a detour ‘round union of lady and maid, who were in tête-à-tête, apparently resolving the earlier rug question, when I heard that unmistakable cough again.

“Jeeves! You’d better find your seat!” I admonished.

“Yes, sir.”

“That is if you’re not staying behind to report to the office tomorrow at nine.”

Cheap jab, but there you have it.

“No, sir.” He paused until the maid was out of earshot, and the lady had boarded. “Mister Van Aldin did reiterate his offer. He remarked that he would have liked to extend to me the position of private secretary, had he not filled the position only two months ago with someone who’d since show satisfaction—”

“I knew it!”

“—and I admit that I was extremely flattered, though not in the least persuaded to leave your service or explore the matter further with the gentleman. The gentleman also expressed his gratitude for my service to his daughter in generous pecuniary form.”

Of course, _that’s_ what the c. of i. had been up to! I refrained from bringing palm to forehead in a hard smack, it would not have been the debonair thing to do. But I felt like it. Sometimes I am, in fact, the simpleton that everyone thinks I am.

The Wooster heart of gold swelled at the Jeeves’s good, and deservedly increased, fortune.

“Well done, Jeeves! An extra bit of the ready for the casino tables, what?”

“Precisely, sir. He also bid me to, and here I am quoting, ‘keep an eye on my little Ruthie.’”

“Protective pop, eh?” I mused, thinking of Pop Bassett, Pop Stoker, and all the other pops I’d come across in my time. “Is there any other kind?”

“I think not, sir.”

Just then, the final ‘all aboard’ rang out, and the iron horses started to snort in earnest.

“Well, best hurry, Jeeves.”

“Yes, sir. I only wanted to give you this.”

He pressed a blue volume upon me.

I stared at the book, dumbfounded, which, regardless of what my odious Aunt Agatha is says is not my perpetual state of being. Then I looked up at Jeeves and cast my memory back to his cheetah sprint.

“Do you mean to tell me, Jeeves, that you ran down a bag snatcher in Victoria Station with this little number under your arm?”

“Yes, sir. You accidentally left it behind as you departed the taxi. I’d seen to the trunks and was _en route_ to return it to you when the distressing incident occurred. Though I judged at once that I had a moral duty to exert myself in the matter of the reclaiming the lady’s handbag, I also did not wish for you to be deprived of engaging reading material on the journey to Dover.”

I tipped my hat with my stick, then made to climb the steps. “I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again, Jeeves, you stand alone.”

“Thank you, sir. I aim to give satisfaction.”

Hanging on by the railings, I watched him retreat down the length of the platform. Just before he disappeared into the train, he turned and caught my eye.

I shot him a look.

And I meant it to kiss.

* * *

As fate would have it, I ended up in the seat opposite Ruth Van Aldin. We exchanged smiles and a bit of small talk about the coincidence and the horrible bag-snatching and the wonder that was Reginald Jeeves but as soon as our journey got properly underway, we settled into what I’ve often read described as ‘companionable silence.’

She took up a magazine, and I my page-turner.

I hadn’t got very far, I mean, I’d finished the first paragraph, when I happened to look up.

Oh, dear.

I could have sworn I had met Ruth Van Aldin before. Had I danced at her wedding? Possibly. Bertram Wooster had bought more fish slices that he could remember, which was the current predic., of course, the not remembering part.

But that wasn’t why I thought ‘Oh, dear.’

I thought ‘Oh, dear’ because the lady was sitting very still, biting her lower lip, her complexion definitely ‘sicklied o'er with the pale cast of thought.’ All in all, she gave the appearance of one trying valiantly not to cry. To cry would, or I imagined, undo at least some of the art she used to enhance her striking features. She had very long, very dark eyelashes that curtained very round, very dark eyes. Seemingly unaware of my study, she blinked, then pinched those dark eyes closed.

Poor Ruth Van Aldin was nursing a secret sorrow, one that probably had nothing to do with almost losing her lizard-lined lizard to a gazelle-like excrescence at a train station. I did not want to force a confidence, naturally, but it pained a _preux chevalier_ like myself to see one of the fairer sex in such a miserable state.

In the next moment, she caught me staring. Her look was curious and soft, not quite the Soul’s Awakening, but perhaps a second cousin of same, once removed, perhaps of the Kent branch of the family. Then her expression hardened into that well-bred impassive mask that I am told is taught on some mothers’ knees.

The decision to act was, with me, the work of a moment. The _preux_ could not resist the temptation of damsel in distress.

But, first, I needed to inspire _bonhomie_ , and for that, I had just the thing.

I dug into my pocket and removed my red morocco case.

“Oh, do you know I have that very same one?” she said.

I put the monocle to my eye. “Really? You’re astigmatic?”

She laughed. “I don’t mean your,” she waved a hand, her crimson-painted fingertips swarmed like lozenge-sized ladybirds, “ _that_. I mean, the case.”

“Right ho.”

Silence reared its mute head again, and she showed every sign of sinking back down amongst the wine and spirits.

“I say,” I said. “Travel by train is a ghastly business.”

At this truth, I bid a silent ‘until we meet again’ to _DEATH ON A TRAIN!_ and brought the azure covers together with a ‘parting is such sweet sorrow’ thud. Then I leaned in and gave my companion my most avuncular smile.

“Would you like to hear a story? I promise it isn’t about a fellow with the same name as me being eaten by a crocodile on the banks of the Zambesi. I’ve been told some of my stories are quite entertaining, and well, it would your mind off your troubles for a bit, what?”

“What makes you think I have troubles?” she asked, and I noted a bit of her inheritance in the steel of her tone and the pointed nature of her stare.

“Doesn’t everybody?” I replied casually, but I gave her a look through the ol’ gold-rimmed porthole that said that, steel and points aside, I’d read her like a book, like the book I wished I was reading.

The shot was on the board, for she smiled, then nodded.

“Right ho,” I said. “How ‘bout one from my visit to New York? I had a friend named Corky who was a portrait-painter, or at least that’s what he called himself, but as a matter of fact his score up to date had been nil. You see the catch about portrait-painting—I’ve looked into the thing a bit...”

* * *

By the end of my tale, my Madonna was weeping.

“Here you go,” I said, offering her a cambric handkerchief, one of the legion that Jeeves outfits me with on long journeys.

She dabbed her eyes carefully so as not to smudge the moistened canvas.

“Oh, Mister Wooster, I’m sorry, but I don’t know when I’ve laughed so hard. That is, quite frankly, the most amusing story I’ve ever heard! And you are such a Scheherazade!”

I doubled down. “How about another?”

She nodded eagerly.

“The Rocky Todd business broke loose early one morning in spring…”

* * *

I kept ‘em coming until finally she said,

“You are a marvel, Mister Wooster, and so is Mister Jeeves. I mean, he seems to spend much of his time—”

“Getting me and my pals out of the soup? Yes, that’s a fair assessment.”

“He certainly different from my Mason. She’s only been with me two months, but I don’t think she could manage half of what your Jeeves does.”

“He is, indeed, one of a kind.”

She looked pensive for a moment, the began, “Do you think—?” Then she stopped as if she’d thought better of the idea.

“Look here,” I said, “are you, by chance, traveling on the Blue Train?”

“Yes!” she replied, her expression brightened, as if she was catching my drift already.

“Well, why don’t you think about it during the crossing and then, if you like, you can tell me the whole story at lunch? If I think it’s something Jeeves could help with, we can both put the matter to him afterwards.”

“That seems like a very sound plan, Mister Wooster. You are so very wise. And so very kind. Thank you so much.”

Good Lord, this monocle was magic! No one, not even Jeeves at the height of his wildest ecstasy nor at the bottom of his favourite bottle, had ever accused Bertram Wooster of being ‘wise.’

I was braced to no end, but nevertheless, added cautiously,

“If you change your mind, of course, that’s all right, too.”

As I mentioned before, we _preux chevaliers_ do not force confidences, no matter how distressed the damsel, or how fetching her lid, or how fresh the memory of her likening us to King Solomon.

“You’re such a good man, Mister Wooster.”

I had no time to wallow in further posy-strewing, for just then, voices without were letting us know that we were nearing the white cliffs.

“Until Calais, then,” she said with a finality that wasn’t lost on a sensitive cove like me.

“Until Calais,” I echoed as I carefully returned my enchanted looking-glass to its case.

* * *

When possible, I prefer the privacy and comfort of a cabin when crossing the English Channel. I’m a decent sailor, but not as good as Jeeves, naturally, what with his Viking blood and his constitutional yearning for the tang of briny breezes.

It was upon being reunited with Jeeves in one such cabin that I recounted my conversation with Ruth Van Aldin.

“So, what do you think?” I asked when I’d finished.

He shook the lemon. “It is a capital mistake to theorise before one has all the evidence, sir.”

“True,” I admitted. “No oscillation on the pavement, as such, but…”

“ _Une affaire de coeur_ is the most likely possibility,” he agreed.

I yawned, then apologised, insisting that it wasn’t the company.

“Sir, the crossing is expected to be smooth. It might be prudent to indulge in a brief but restorative sleep before we reach Calais.”

I nodded, then cast a wistful glance at the volume in my lap. “I wanted to dive into this, but it’s one of those spirit versus the flesh battles I’m afraid.”

“There will be time, sir. Our holiday has scarcely begun.”

I needed no further encouragement. I tucked myself as comfortably as I could into my seat and closed my eyes.

My body set about restoring the tissues, but my thoughts went a-roving, specifically, to events of the previous night, the ranygazoo that had transpired _after_ I had returned home from supping with the lads at the Drones.


	3. INTERMISSION: PORN

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> This is a stand-alone porn chapter. 
> 
> Warnings/notes for oral sex, anal sex, rimming, use of anal plug, and top!Jeeves.

Jeeves and I always enjoy our romps, and the night prior to our departure for Nice was no different.

Jeeves set aside his improving book, his second improving book, that is, the one I’d just given him as a token of my highest esteem and as an appropriate literary companion for our impending sojourn to the French Riviera. The first improving book, of course, the one he’d been reading when I arrived home from the Drones, had already been set aside.

Now, dash it all, where was I?

Oh, yes. Forget the books. You’re not actually reading this chapter for staging and props, are you?

Didn’t think so. Right ho.

The Wooster unmentionables commenced to stir the moment that Jeeves took me in hand and led me in the direction of his lair. That we were headed to his own sanctum sanctorum for the night’s frolic meant that he was quite eager for the band to start playing our song, if you know what I mean.

When the hey-nonny-nonny and the hot-cha-cha begins in the master’s chamber, Jeeves feels obliged to be his usual slow, deliberate, methodical self in removing the Englishman’s outer crust. In his own nook, however, it’s different. Though he’s still very careful to set, hang, and fold everything nicely on a chair, it’s all done at an _andante_ tempo rather that the traditional _adagio_. Philosophers and disgruntled young men about town may ask, from time to time, if trousers matter, but Jeeves’s faith in the purity of the ironing board is immutable.  

In terms of divesting the master of his raiment, Jeeves’s pace that night was commiserate with a spritely foxtrot and, I believe, set a personal best for speed. What’s more, every bit of Wooster skin, once exposed, was celebrated with a series of ripe caresses from his courtesan-caliber hands and mouth.

Having succeeded in stripping me to the waist, the keeper of my heart then slotted his corpus behind mine. His hands snaked under my arms, and his fingers set to pinching my rosy nips while his tongue lathed either side of my neck.

I sighed and relaxed into Jeeves’s embrace, thrilled beyond speech that the torso found was a bare one. I rubbed against Jeeves in ‘yellow fog upon the window-panes’ manner and received a jolly chuckle followed by an even jollier bite on the neck for my efforts.

As I swooned like Lilian Gish, my knees threatening to swash-buckle, I made a mental note to visit that bookshop as soon as I returned to the metrop. If this was the result, I’d bally well plunder every last ‘exceedingly rationale’ work on the shelves and dole them out, one by one, every Friday night for years!

I corkscrewed in Jeeves’s arms, offering the well-thumbed nips to his sorcerer’s mouth. Of course, I was as hard as the rock that they bound ol’ what-s his-name to. But it wasn’t my liver, but rather the pink cherries on the Wooster top that were getting pecked. And wasn’t I a picture, of the naughty Parisian postcard variety, arching backwards, moaning and writhing while Jeeves suckled and bit at my pleasant fruits?

I had the fleeting notion that I must have made it onto that distinguished list of ‘those whom the gods would destroy’ because dashed if I wasn’t first driven mad by Jeeves’s ministrations! For without the safety net of his arms and hands, I would have surely collapsed to the floor like a Monday morning circus tent.

The Wooster tent pole was, of course, showing no signs of folding. It was standing very tall and very hard and digging sharply into Jeeves’s own impressive monument to the divine pash.

Jeeves guided me to a more perpendicular stance vis-à-vis terra firma, and when I was somewhat steady on my pins, began to trail kisses down my stomach.

Desperate for his mouth, I freed my prick.

Jeeves knelt and wasted no time in taking all of me in his oral cavern.

I groaned my appreciation for his zeal and singleness of purpose.

“Jeeves! Good man, good man!”

He hummed, and the vibrations traveled through me like a message on a wire, a message that read YES YES YES YES GOD YES at ten bob a word.

I laid my mitts on Jeeves’s head, not for guidance, for Jeeves required none, but balance. I was a Tower of Pisa one seismic tremour away from tipping.

And Jeeves?

Well, Jeeves sucked the Wooster prick as if he’d been a child prodigy of fellatio _and_ dedicated his whole life to the study of it. In fact, he sucked with such force that when the pride of the Woosters finally sprang from the corpus, I wasn’t entirely certain that other liquified body parts might not follow—like a brain.

“Jeeves,” I gasped when speech returned.

He looked up, and one corner of his mouth twitched. “It was a thoughtful gift.”

“I think of you that much, that often, old thing,” I panted.

When he’s on his knees after a finale, Jeeves likes nuzzling a spent prick and it environs, and I like to pet a bean, so we indulged our preferences for a short eternity, swapping affection and tenderness like the cooing lovebirds we were.

But soon it was time for act two.

I took Jeeves’s hands in mine and guided them to the waist of the trousers that always matter. Prescient bird, Jeeves slipped his hands beneath the wears, outer and under, while I eyed his face carefully, eager to catch the Soul’s Awakening.

His mouth formed a noiseless O and he looked at me with a wild surmise.

I grinned.

“I was wearing a Number One this morning and switched to a Number Two before heading to the Drones,” I said.

His hands caressed my buttocks, then one finger made like Cortez, or Balboa, and went exploring, finding the ring affixed to the end of the plug, the plug that had been keeping me stretched all day.

This was the moment when I struck the match and let it fall upon the powder keg that was the psychology of the individual that was my nearest and dearest.

“Of course, we did have that splendid bit of charades,” I remarked casually, pausing for nothing but dramatic effect, “after the orgy, of course. Scottish Express, it was. I drew the car between Pongo Twisleton and Barmy Fotheringay-Phipps. Pongo ploughed me ‘til I bled while I tongue-juiced Barmy ‘til he almost made Oofy Prosser a eunuch. Oofy never does turn the right way in these things, of course, he’s too prick-struck about Bingo’s bingo take anything else up the sitter. I had Freddy Wigeon’s stick in one hand and Catsmeat Potter-Pirbright’s baton in the other and they played naughts and crosses on my back with their bunk-spunk.”

_WHAM!_

I was thrown face-first onto the bed, stripped, and mounted. There was the soft scraped whisper of a well-oiled drawer opening, then shutting. The plug was removed and replaced by a well-slicked finger. I lifted my arse in invitation, and at once, it was tea for two at Bertram’s bun shop.

I suppose in some lights it’s a credit to Jeeves that even caught up in a wave of green-eyed monstrosity, he is ever the cautious one, but at that particular moment, I was counting his restraint as a debit.

The stretching was taking too long.

I squirmed impatiently and, for my trouble, got a slap to my flank and a delicious growl in my ear.

“Naughty gentlemen, especially those who spoil their proper sodding by indulging in too much high-spiritedness at their club, must learn to wait.”

Just as I was burying my naughtiest Old Etonian howl in the bedding, there was the nudge of a prickhead at my rim, and no matter how much the mind wants it and how much the orifice is prepared for it, there’s always a moment of _nolle prosequi_ at the burn of first breeching.

I hissed.

Jeeves stilled.

When I finally gave a nod, he resumed his invasion very slowly, all the while licking the nape of my neck and shoulders. When he was fully sheathed, I gurgled,

“Jeeves, may I speak frankly?”

“Certainly,” he replied in a strained voice, punctuating the word with a wet, suckling kiss to that delicious spot just below my earlobe.

“What I have to say may wound you. That is, it may, indirectly, give the wholly erroneous impression that I view your previous paramourous efforts, or even tonight’s preamble, as anything less than stuff to give the troops.”

“Not at all.”

I might have heard the faint flicker of a smile in his reply, but I can’t be certain and was in no position to confirm or refute the hypothesis. His weight was resting heavier and heavier on me, and his muscles were as taut as violin strings. He was valiantly reining of the ol’ pash, and I considered it high time those reins snapped.

“Well then, what I mean to say, or rather ask, is would you mind buggering me like I just brought you a telegram from Cleveland Street?”

And with that, he let me bally well have it.

He pulled the Wooster lemon back by the hair and began pounding the Wooster arse as if his prick were the spade and my hole was sporting a very large X marks the spot.

The _thump-thump-thump_ -ing of the bedframe against the wall only added to the wicked symphony of grunts and snorts and half-barked oaths, the latter of which Jeeves would never admit to even knowing in normal circs. From thrust to thrust, I interjected my own whimpered tenor of encouragement.

Finally, the dam broke. And here I must confess that while you could measure Bertram’s love-jam out in coffee spoons and still have quite a few clean ones left over for, you know, stirring coffee, Jeeves is a _geyser_. What I mean to say is the corpus was flooded with forty days and forty nights’ worth.

Jeeves withdrew sword from scabbard and collapsed atop me and we remained like that, two stacked slabs of sweaty, spent flesh, perfect for a cannibal’s Sunday brunch with the clan, until Jeeves resumed his napeish nuzzling and murmured,

“It may have been injudicious—”

“I agree,” I agreed. “Your pash-stick’s a crime. Put you before a beak and a jury of your thick-cocked peers in a court of bugger-all and you’ll get fined a fiver, at least, for indecency, perhaps even thirty days without the option.”

Jeeves laughed, and using the technique that he’d taught me for remembering people’s names and addresses and whatnot, I pinned the sound like a rare butterfly and added it to my collection of beautiful things.

“You will be seated much of tomorrow,” he continued.

“Ah, you’ve given me a bit of souvenir, what?”

“I’m sorry.”

“I’m not. But if it would ease your conscience, why, you could apply a bit of Stetson’s Sitter Salve, ‘It soothes the sorest seat.’”

At that, there fluttered another handsome specimen of mirth, and this time, the puffs of breath kissed my damp skin.

“With all due respect to Mister Stetson, I prefer to rely on my own preparation.”

He rose, then hoisted me to my knees. I inched forward and rested my hands on the wall. Then he spread my buttocks and went to the proverbial town.

Now it’s not much fun having your face pressed to a wall, but I had no other choice. If Jeeves kept licking the Wooster rim like it was his favourite ice cream, then the Wooster cheek—note, not one the cheeks being firmly gripped by the best of men’s mitts, the other one—would have to remain squashed like a winged bit of pestilence on a window.

My prick was half-hard when the gripping hands became massaging hands, rubbing me from my tailbone to the back of my knees.

“With all due respect to Mister Stetson, Jeeves, your salve is tops.”

“Thank you.”

He drew back until he was sitting on the very edge of the bed. I turned and followed, crawling into his lap, facing him, my legs dangling off his thighs.

“You know I was just winding you up about the Drones,” I said.

“Yes, but it was a shrewd stratagem, nonetheless. Even my awareness of its purpose did not reduce its efficacy.”

His lips twitched, and his eyes shown with a ‘god’s in his heavens, etcetera’ contentment. He reached for the jar of slick on the bedside table but fell about six inches short of the mark. I made up the difference and retrieved the jar, then set it on the bed beside him.

We both slicked our hands. He began stroking my dragonous tumescence, which, having been woke from its slumber, was once more taking a lively interest in the proceedings, and I rolled his snooker balls like an alchemist trying to ascertain whether they were made of gold or lead. The last is an act which never ceases to produce a lovely ‘burning bright, in the forests of the night’ purr from Jeeves.

“Bertram.”

A smile split my mug in two. That utterance from those lips was the rarest of all the order _Lepidoptera_.

“Ol’ thing,” I responded warmly.

He looked as if he was about to let loose a ripe bit of verse.

But as much as I enjoy playing rapt audience to Jeeves’s private recitations, I didn’t want the distraction. You see, I was quite keen for the curtain to fall on what would very likely be the last song-and-dance number of the night, and so when Jeeves went a bit ‘stuffed frog’ in the face, I averted the gaze and adjusted myself so that my column was aside his.

Then I looked at him and he looked at me. And it was some of that ‘two minds with but a single thought’ business. And that thought, needless to say, was not poetry, but rather a nice frigging duet.

And so we wrapped our hands around our joined prickage and stroked each other to a second coming, the kind devoid of horsemen and harlots and all that other ranygazoo.

“Jeeves,” I sighed, running my palms over his chest and shoulders. “Should we cheese the whole trip and stay home, doing bugger-all and bugger-me and whatnot?”

“Though the notion has merit, I think not. I think it will prove a most enjoyable holiday, and I have no doubt that any obstacles to that enjoyment will be considered challenges to our ingenuity and that we will be thoroughly successful in surmounting them.”

“We’ll be a pair of right clever fucks, won’t we?”

“As you say.”

“Jeeves.” My eyelids seemed to droop of their own accord, and I suddenly felt, at once, the weight of the long day behind me and the long day ahead of me.

“A wash and a rest?” he proposed.

I grunted.

He provided the former and then led me to my own bed for the latter.

“You’re staying, aren’t you?” I asked as I slipped between the sheets. Sometimes he doesn’t, which his fine, but, well, not preferable.

“I will return,” he promised.

“Bugger the clothes, Jeeves!” I said with a bit more pip than I meant.

He looked horrified. “Never, sir!”

Sir. Yes, well, it was just about ‘sir’ hour, wasn’t it?

“Oh, very well,” I said and turned my face to the wall.

Sleep threatened to overtake me, but then I felt the dip in the bed and a warm, Jeeves-shaped corpus at my back. And then came the postponed recital, which was, in its way, a kind of lullaby.

_“I went out to the hazel wood…_

_…I dropped the berry in a stream_

_And caught a little silver trout…_

_…It had become a glimmering girl_

_With apple blossom in her hair..._

_I will find out where she has gone…_

_and pluck till time and times are done_

_The silver apples of the moon,_

_The golden apples of the sun.”_

I smiled a half-smile and mumbled, “Not your own.”

“No, the poet Yeats.”

“S’wonderful. S’marvelous.”

“So are you.”

* * *

“Sir.”

“What ho. Sorry,” I mumbled. I blinked, then opened my eyes and took the cambric square from Jeeves’s outstretched hand.

"Did you enjoy your rest, sir?"

As I wiped bits of un-debonair drool, crusted and fresh, from the corners of my mouth, I grunted and shifted in my seat and realised instantly that while Bertram’s mind was in a ferry crossing the English Channel, Bertram’s body, specifically the point of his under-the-trousers triton, so to speak, was still stuck in naughty reverie.

“I would recommend a brisk walk on deck, sir,” said Jeeves.

“I’d love to!” I cried. “As soon as I can leave the cabin without making headlines on the scandal sheets!”

“If I may be of assistance…”

“Jeeves!” I hissed. “I don’t think it’s the time!”

“I was going to suggest a mental exercise, rather than a manual one, _sir_.”

It was the _molto_ stress on the ‘sir’ that did it.

“Right ho. What is it?!”

“Close your eyes, sir.”

“Jeeves, you mightn’t be aware, but closing my eyes is what got me in the dashed state to begin with!”

“Please, _sir_.”

I huffed and closed my eyes.

“You are on a bathing beach. The sun is warm, the breeze is cool, seabirds cry in the distance…”

“Jeeves!”

“…there is a figure approaching you from the sea…”

“Jeeves!”

“…it is Mrs. Spenser-Gregson in a bathing costume…”

“Aunt Agatha! Oh, God!”

“…she approaches and announces that you are now married to the recently widowed Lady Siddcup…”

“Not the Bassett!”

“…and she presents you with a gift, a wooden sign that reads ‘Two Lovers Built this Nest’ and expects you to hang it over the hearth of your marital home...”

“The hearth in which I stick my head and end it all!” I cried.

“…which she will be visiting every Sunday to inquire, in her authoritative way, how the issue is issuing.”

My eyes flew open, and I looked down at my lap.

“Thank you, Jeeves! I should not have doubted you. That did the trick!”

“You’re very welcome, sir.”

“I think I will take that walk before we’re decanted. Oh, and here.” I removed the pale-lavender-coloured rosebud from my lapel and offered it to him. “A token of, well, you know.”

“Thank you, sir,” he said, taking it. “It is my favourite flower.”

“Really? All this time, and I didn’t know you had a favourite flower.”

“My grandfather was found of his roses, and he planted one bush for each of his grandchildren. This was mine.”   He took the bud and placed it between the pages of his book.

“I shall fill the residence with them on your birthday.”

“I look forward to it, sir. Enjoy your stroll.”


	4. Chapter 4

“I am mad, Mister Jeeves,” said Ruth Van Aldin. “For the first time in my life, I am swept away by emotion. I am swept away to the point of doing an incredibly foolish and reckless thing. Part of me knows it’s folly and condemns it, and part of me _will_ have what I want and will not be balked. I tell you I am mad!”

Trembling hands clutched at the crocodile-skin bag as dark eyes darted from Jeeves to me.

It was a curious setting. Jeeves, usually such a stickler for seemliness, had insisted that the lady join the two of us in my compartment, which was a single berth with a communicating door that led onto Jeeves’s own single berth.

Unconventional, not just because we were the epitome of scandal, two men entertaining a lady whom they’d just met in a private compartment, but also because I was seated beside the lady and Jeeves was facing us, folded into a rather elegant crouch. I mean to say, these spaces weren’t designed for the Council of Trent, were they? Not enough room to lose a cat on the swing much less make up for it on the roundabout.

An English lady would not have stood, or rather sat, for it, but then but perhaps it was for the best, for when the door to the corridor was pulled to, our guest began to let loose with a feverish panic that had been notably absent from the ‘feast of reason and flow of soul’ that she and I had shared over luncheon.

At her outburst, Jeeves looked grave. He had in his hand the ready square of cambric; I was armed with sympathetic interjections.

“There, there,” I said. “Why don’t you tell us all about it?”

I realised it was time for the monocle to do its magic. I set the glim in the squinter and the case on the seat between Ruth Van Aldin and self, and like Alice, Ruth Van Aldin gazed into my looking-glass and drew nearer.

“There is a man whom I am fond of—very fond of. We cared for each other when we were young, and we were thrust apart brutally and unjustly,” Ruth Van Aldin began.

“Ah,” I exhaled. I believe I’d seen this show, maybe a hundred times, in the West End and Broadway and the picture house. “Your father’s work, the thrusting apart?”

“Yes. Now we have come together again.”

“Right ho,” I said.

Jeeves said nothing.

“He is coming to meet me now,” she continued. “Oh! I dare say you both think it is all wrong, but you don’t know the circumstances. I’m married. My husband is impossible. He has treated me disgracefully.”

Now I was _quite_ certain I’d seen this show, but I emitted a noise that was Embassy Row by way of Harley Street, viz. diplomatic and tactful, then I tacked on an ‘I see’ for good measure.

Jeeves was still as silent as the tomb, though his face still retained a certain expression _sympathique_ , as I believe our Gallic cousins call it.

“What I feel so badly about is this. I have deceived my father. He wishes me to divorce my husband, and, of course, he has no idea that I am going to meet this other man. He would think it extraordinarily foolish.”

When Jeeves finally spoke, he, too, employed a rather Harley Street tone but his was that of a nerve specialist’s.

“What do _you_ think, Madam?”

“I suppose it is foolish, but I can’t draw back now.”

“Why ever not?” I cried.

“It is all arranged,” she said.

“Tosh. Things can always be unarranged,” I insisted. “There are drainpipes to climb down, two o’clock boats to America to flee upon, two-seaters in the barn, raincoats to drape over swans, all kinds of ways of un-arranging, what, Jeeves?”

“Very true, sir,” said Jeeves.

“But it would break Armand’s heart!”

Don’t you believe it, I thought. Hearts are pretty tough. I mean, before Jeeves and I decided to cut the sweet apple and share it, I’d been in love scores of times, and engaged even more often than that.

But naturally, I didn’t voice this view. We Woosters know when to hold the tongue.

And of course, the ruddy bounder’s name was _Armand_. I mean, really. I hoped that whenever I finally learned the Christian name of Lord Enteric Fever or whatever the sleuth was called in _DEATH ON A TRAIN!_ it wasn’t something ridiculous like Armand or I’d be sorely disappointed.

Ruth Van Aldin opened her handbag and passed me a letter, saying, “He will think I have no courage, no strength of purpose.”

I read it, then gave it to Jeeves.

_Chère Amie,_

_I will board the train as soon as it arrives at Paris Nord. Then we can travel together to the Isles d’Or, far away from the world._

_It is like you and your divine sympathy to be so interested in the work on famous jewels that I am writing. It will, indeed, be an extraordinary privilege to see and handle these historic rubies. I am devoting a special passage to ‘Heart of Fire.’_

_My wonderful one! Soon I will make up to you for all those sad years of separation and emptiness._

_Your ever-adoring,_

_Armand_

It was a test of the Wooster mask that I did not show my true feelings as I read this piece of correspondence. Quite frankly, I don’t believe that a missive could be any fruiter if you dropped a whole bowl of ambrosial salad on it!

Jeeves handed the letter back to its owner with a handkerchief.

For an instant, her head drooped, and it seemed that tears from the depth of some divine despair would rise in her heart and gather to her eyes, as the poet Tennyson says. But they didn’t. She simply sat the letter on the seat beside her and wrung the proffered cambric.

Jeeves and I took the opportunity to exchange significant glances. Somehow, his finely-chiseled features looked even stonier.

“He mentions rubies,” said Jeeves.

“Yes, they were a recent birthday gift from my father.”

“And they are with you?” he asked.

“Yes.” She brought out her red morocco case from her handbag and snapped it open.

“Lord love a duck!” I gasped.

“The Heart of Fire,” explained Jeeves. “was originally part of the Crown jewels of Russia.”

“Yes, aren’t they unique?” cried Ruth. “I love jewels. I always have.” She beamed at the red stones, then snapped the case closed and set it beside her on the seat.

“Madam, forgive me if the question is impertinent but is the gentleman in question,” I knew it was costing Jeeves to call this scoundrel a ‘gentleman,’ “of French nationality?”

“Oh, yes. He’s the Comte de la Roche of the Villa Marina in Antibes.”

I was once again thankful for the Wooster mask, for any frank facial expression at this point would have let the cat out of the barn and closed the door.

This poor Madonna was being a right chump! Like at Belshazzar’s feast, the writing was on the wall or, if you prefer, right there, in plain, dashed soupy ink on foolscap.

First, this cad may call himself the Comte de la Roche, but I would have bet my last soft-bosomed shirt, that is, if Jeeves would let me have any, that he wouldn’t be found in Gotha’s Almanac, a farmer’s almanac or any other almanac, unless there happens to be an Encyclopædia Rake & Rascal-annica.

Second, _Armand_ was clearly after these jewels, and Ruth Van Aldin, acting quite unlike the chip off the captain of industry’s tooth, was making it obscenely simple for him to get them. I mean, I’ve seen babies guard their comforters more shrewdly than this female of the species was guarding what probably amounted to half a million dollars in baubles.

And, third, this so-called Comte’s sudden foray into historical researches was as pathetic ruse as any I’d heard. It was as if I’d decided to seduce Jeeves by telling him I was writing an article for _Milord’s Boudoir_ entitled ‘What the Well-Dressed Man is Wearing when He’s Taking a Very Naughty Liberty with his Gentleman’s Gentleman’s Very Personal Gentleman, I Mean to Say, His Prick.”

I mean to say, what?

And if even I, Bertram Wooster, who was considered by a good number of my relations to warrant confinement in some kind of home for half-witted could see through this stratagem, though I daresay such a feeble ploy hardly merited so sophisticated a term, why on earth couldn’t Ruth Van Aldin see through it, too?

I got my answer soon enough.

“When I am with Armand, a madness overtakes me. He has me completely under his spell,” she confessed.

I sympathised with her, truly I did. It was that old ‘Fish gotta swim, bird gotta fly’ song but just because you couldn’t help loving ‘dat man,’ it didn’t mean you needed to be a complete mug about it. I was trying to think of a delicate way to phrase this when her story suddenly decided to take a walk with a Wilkie Collins’ heroine in the rain.

“And I don’t know—I don’t know,” she said. “Ever since I left Victoria I have had a horrible feeling of something—something that is coming to me very soon—that I can’t escape. You must think I am mad talking to you like this, but I tell you I know something horrible is going to happen.”

She spoke with such emotion, I started to feel the mirror crack’d a bit myself.

“Do you think it’s the rubies?” I asked. “I mean, something called the ‘Heart of Fire,’ I bet it has a curse on it. All those fancy stones do. Jeeves, what was that blue one in the Christmas goose?”

“The Blue Carbuncle, sir?”

“Yes, it had a curse on it, didn’t it?”

“Purportedly, sir.”

Jeeves, as always, was immune to atmosphere and superstition, but there was something in his eyes, a glint, that I’d never seen before. It made my flesh goose, and not in the golden-egg- or blue-carbuncle-laying way.

“Madam,” he said. “I think it was most injudicious for you to bring those gems with you. They belong in the Bank.”

“You sound like Dad.”

I had to agree with her on that point. And agree with Jeeves on his point. I’m broad-minded that way.

“Nevertheless,” said Jeeves. “It is sound advice, and if your husband were to learn of your plan to meet this gentleman?”

“He’s already heard rumours, I’m certain, but yes, it would give him what he needs to fight the divorce case, though his own conduct is much more deplorable.”

“Why would he fight the case?” I asked, suspecting I knew the answer.

“He’s got very expensive taste in friends and hobbies,” she said, derisively. “And is in very low water because of it. When news of the divorce leaks, his creditors will be after him.”

“Madam, is it your wish to rendezvous with that gentleman in Paris?” asked Jeeves.

She looked him straight in the eye, and what happened next was the rummiest thing and I’ll tell you why.

You know how at the end of many of my escapades, there’s usual something, like an Alpine hat or purple socks or a moustache, that gets surrendered as a kind of reward for Jeeves getting self and co. out of some kind of soup? Well, typically, right _before_ the relinquishing, there is a moment when his eyes meet mine. Sometimes we speak in the language of eyebrows; sometimes it’s only a shared look.

Well, that moment was that moment, if you catch my meaning.

But they weren’t Bertram’s eyes looking into Jeeves’s, they were Ruth Van Aldin’s. And it was rummy, dashed rummy, in fact, to be a fly in the soup, or rather, for once, not in the soup, just a fly doing the backstroking and witnessing the production, rather than, you know, sharing first billing.

But in the end, Ruth Van Aldin did what Bertram Wooster always does, which is bow to Jeeves’s design or, in this case, common sense.

“I never want to see Armand again. I do not want to be made any more fool than I already am.”

There was steel in her voice, and then she did something I’ve only seen done in plays and films: she took up the letter and tore it into large pieces and let them fall, scattered about her.

I was momentarily taken aback by this display of emotion, and I think Jeeves was, too, although he was probably more concerned about the mess she’d made in my compartment.

Nevertheless, I knew it was time to rally ‘round. “That’s the spirit!” I cried. “And don’t worry, everyone has been a fool at one time another,” I hastened to add, with a smile. “For example, one night when I returned homes from Pongo Twisleton’s birthday part, I thought the hat rack was a burglar.”

She laughed, then looked at me, her lips curling into a wry smirk but her gaze soft. “Do you know you are a specific dream-rabbit, Mister Wooster?”

My cheeks warmed, and I would’ve ‘aw, shucks’ if Jeeves hadn’t got right back to business.    

“You could send a wire from Paris to your father, and your father would come to you at once.”

“Yes, I could do that. Dear old Dad. It is strange—I never knew until today how terribly fond of him I am.” She found the handkerchief she’d dropped in favour of the letter-shredding and dabbed her eyes. Then she stopped and sighed in a defeatist tone,

“Oh, it’s no use! It won’t work.”

“Why not?” I asked.

“Because Armand is planning to board at Paris Nord, and when I see him…”

“Madam, if you were to provide me with a short, written statement,” said Jeeves, “I would ensure that the gentleman receives it and that he leaves the train promptly and without disturbing you.”

“You would do that for me, Mister Jeeves?” she asked.

“Yes, if it would aide you in maintaining your resolve. I am not dismissive of the pain that you are suffering, Madam. I am quite familiar with it, and I would not wish it on anyone.”

Well now, this was news. I couldn’t help but wonder what kind of Comte de la Rumminess figured in Jeeves’s past.

“Armand will insist on seeing me,” said Ruth Van Aldin.

“He will try,” said Jeeves. “But if you are willing, we could stage a scene that would most probably hasten his departure.”

“What scene?” she asked.

“We could arrange for the gentleman to see you kissing Mister Wooster in your compartment.”

Oh, my Sainted Aunt!

Her eyes saucered. So did mine.

“Your back would be toward the gentleman. You need never see him. And upon witnessing such a scene, I feel strongly that the gentleman would choose to avoid direct confrontation. His retreat would provide you the opportunity to decide your next course of action with a clearer head.”

Her eyes drifted to the wall behind Jeeves. She stared for a while, then exhaled and looked at me.

I tried to smile but felt a bit like the fly in the lens.

Finally, she said, “Very well, Mister Jeeves. I’ll return to my own compartment to write the letter.

“Yes, Madam.”

Just then, we heard voices in the corridor.

“Good Lord, it’s Mason!” said Ruth Van Aldin. “She can’t see me coming out of here, but the moment’s it’s all clear, I need to leave. I don’t want to arouse any more suspicion on her part.”

Jeeves manned the door. When the voices died, he peered out, then made a motion.

“Oh, excuse me, Mister Wooster. I almost got the wrong case.”

Then, as they say, the lady vanished.

When Jeeves and I were alone, I tucked the monocle into its bed.

He got to his knees and began collecting the bits of torn letter. I thought he was going to bin them, but I was wrong.

“What are you doing, Jeeves?”

“I plan to reassemble the piece of correspondence, sir.”

“Why on earth would you do that?”

“It is not inconceivable that the lady may change her mind and return for them, sir, and finding them binned or burned, become highly agitated.”

I blinked, then shrugged. “As you say, but,” and here I felt the need to clear the air, “Jeeves, I mean to say, what? I think you owe the master a bit of explanation. First, why did you insist on having this little _tête-à-tête-à-tête_ here? Not the done thing and that’s very unlike you.”

“Though it was taking a great liberty as well as a considerable risk, I thought privacy paramount. Like our own travel arrangement, the lady and her maid are sharing adjoining compartments.”

“So?”

He had gathered all the bits of paper and tucked them into his blue book. Then he gave me his full attention.

“What are your impressions of the lady’s maid, sir?”

It was a ‘You know my methods, Watson’ moment if ever there was one, so I gave the question due consideration—and arrived, much like the Baker Street companion, at absolutely nothing.

“I have no impression, Jeeves. She’s a lady’s maid. Tall, thin, black clothes, spoon-like. If you saw her on the street, you’d sing ‘hey, sir, that’s my maid-y, no, sir, don’t mean tweenie’ or something along those lines.”

“Does she strike you as a bit ‘too much’ of lady’s maid?”

“I have no idea what ‘too much’ means in terms of lady’s maids, Jeeves. She doesn’t strike me as anything.”

He tilted the onion. “It is my firm belief, sir, that she is _not_ a lady’s maid.”

“What?! Then what is she?”

“I couldn’t say, sir. But there is a very slight, and perhaps unnoticeable to anyone who does not have regular contact with lady’s maids in the course of one’s professional duties, touch of the French farce about her.”

I goggled at him.

“I would be willing to wager your best shirt studs on it, sir,” he said.

“It might be her first job,” I argued.

“True. I am not ready to attach sinister implications to the situation. There are many reasons why someone who is not a lady’s maid would present herself as one.”

“I say. Do you remember when Catsmeat Potter-Pirbright pretended to be my valet Meadows while I was pretending to Gussie Fink-Nottle and Gussie was pretending to be me?”

“I recall it vividly, sir. As I say, there are many reasons why a maid might not be a maid, and I thought perhaps the lady’s troubles might somehow be related, but it is my impression, based on our conversation, that she is wholly ignorant of her maid’s subterfuge.”

“Do you think the maid’s in cahoots with this Comte de la Roche?”

“That is another possibility.”

“Now, Jeeves, I don’t want to press a confidence, but if one day you feel the urge to unload past troubles, I’d be the most sympathetic of ears. You looked very grave when you said that you were familiar with a bloke like the so-called Comte de la Roche.”

“Not _like_ the Comte de la Roche, sir. The man himself.”

“Good Lord, Jeeves! Do you know absolutely everyone on the planet?!”

“Hardly, sir. It was while I was in the employ of Lord Bridgnorth not very long after he was elevated to the peerage for services to his party. He is a widower with one daughter, Emmaline. She fell into the clutches of this Comte de la Roche whilst on holiday with her father and an aunt in Antibes. The Comte romanced the young lady, then succeeded in relieving her of some very valuable jewelry which had been left to her by her late mother. He did so by replacing the genuine articles with very good paste imitations. The ruse wasn’t discovered until the girl returned to England, and when the father tried to press charges, the gentleman,” and here Jeeves didn’t try to hide his disgust, “employed a ruthless bit of blackmail to secure his Lordship’s silence. He, as the story says, got away with it.”

“Great Scott, Jeeves!”

“Yes, sir. And the most tragic part of the tale is the end. The young lady collapsed under the nervous strain and is now under care in the country. It has been some years, but as far as I know, she has not recovered. Her father abandoned his business and party affairs and now lives in a small cottage near her rest home. He, too, quite broken.”

“That’s why you’re rallying ‘round this lady so hard?”

“Yes. I made a promise to Mister Van Aldin and I wish, as a matter of principle, to see through, at least until we arrive in Nice. It will also give me a certain satisfaction to confront the scoundrel.”

“But why this kissing scheme? I mean, it might work, but it seems like one of _my_ fruitier schemes, not yours.”

“It is based on the psychology of the individual, in this case, the individual being the man who calls himself the Comte de la Roche.”

“Got him figured out, have you?”

“The lady is correct. A letter alone would not dissuade him. He is a swindler. He preys on women. I believe he has every intention of stealing the Heart of Fire. But he takes no risks. He is, above all, a coward. He plays it safe and mean. He is not violent. In fact, violence is counter to his interests in every sense. And, thus, when faced with an obstacle like a rival, he will retreat and try again when the lady is alone and more vulnerable.”

I nodded. “The low-down game.”

“Precisely, sir.”

“Well, let’s beat him at it.”

His mouth twitched. “Thank you for your cooperation, sir.”

I shrugged, then looked about the compartment. “I think I’ll go to the club car and have a thoughtful cigarette, or ten, until my curtain call. Wait, do you think she’ll tell Mason, whatever she is, the plan?”

“Unlikely, sir. Though someone who is clever enough to impersonate a lady’s maid may be clever enough to divine our plan without explanation.”

“I suppose we’ll just have to burn that bridge when we come to it, what?”

“Yes, sir. Do you desire reading matter, sir?”

I sighed and glanced longingly at my beautiful rhapsody in blue, which was resting on a shelf too small to hold anything much larger than a single unread opus.

“No, thank you. I think I want to Heathcliff-on-the-moor a bit.”

“Very good, sir,” said Jeeves softly, and I can’t be certain, of course, but I think he meant it to kiss.

* * *

I don’t know why it is, but the journey ‘round the _ceinture_ of Paris by train is always the most wearisome part of the whole sojourn south. The first of these interminable stops is Pars Nord and the final, before the train starts barreling its way towards the coast, is the Gare de Lyon.

By the time Jeeves appeared at the door of the club car, I’d fallen into a rather brown study. For an unmarked duration of time, I pondered the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune and whether truth was beauty and beauty truth and lot of other rot while smoking quite a few cigarettes and nursing a pair of strong whiskey and s.’s. The only missing prop was my barnacle, that is to say, my monocle which I had foolishly left behind in my compartment and was in no mood to go and fetch.

Jeeves beckoned, and, of course, I followed. He led me to Ruth Van Aldin’s compartment, and with every step, I felt more and more like a thespian about to face the footlights.

“What ho, what ho, what ho!”

My cry made my leading lady laugh, and the tension melted quickly enough.

“Oh, Mister Wooster,” she sighed, smiling as she stood. I had a glimpse of the not-maid in the next compartment before the communicating door was pulled to. “How ‘bout a story?”

“I’ve got just the one,” I said, but it took four before we reached Paris Nord.

As the train pulled into the station, Ruth Van Aldin and I got to our feet and took our places. As soon as I heard Jeeves’s voice in the corridor, to which the Wooster ears are always tuned, I took a deep breath, then swept my lady into my arms and brought my blank-canvas lips to her scarlet ones.

There may have been voices growing louder in the corridor, but I was concentrating on my performance. Of course, it wasn’t like kissing Jeeves. I mean, this form was slight and soft and smelled of bougainvillea, but I did my best. I heard the soft double knock on the wall of the corridor and threw my all into it, dipping the lady and applying direct pressure to the wound as they say in the first aid guides.

The door flew open, then slammed closed.

I set Ruth Van Aldin on her feet and took a step backwards. Her eyes were closed, and her body shook. The Wooster heart bled for the ewe lamb. I folded her back in my arms and repeated over and over, with genuine emotion, “It’s okay. That’s a girl. All over. Not to worry.”

We remained frozen in that tableau for a few minutes, then there were two taps on the door.

“Jeeves?” I called.

The door opened.                                                    

His was the solemn voice of an executioner.

“It is done, Madam.”

Ruth Van Aldin fell from my embrace and collapsed onto the seat. Her head in her hands, she began to sob.

I offered her a handkerchief.

Without looking up, she snatched it from my hand.

“Madam—” began Jeeves.

“Oh, go away!” she howled. “Leave me alone!”

“Yes, Madam, but you have, I believe, Mister Wooster’s monocle.”

At this, Jeeves opened the red morocco case in his hands.

The rubies!

I drew in a sharp breath. “Good Lord, Jeeves! Do you mean there’s been half a million dollars’ worth of jewels just lying about my compartment?!”

Ruth Van Aldin opened her handbag.

I caught the hurled case.

“What do I care about rubies?” she shouted. She looked up and her lip was curled in a snarl. “What do I care about any of it? Get out!”

I put my case in my pocket and headed for the door just as Jeeves set the case with the jewels on the seat. Then we cheesed it proper.

Once in the corridor, Jeeves and I stood face-to-face.

“We have scotch’d the snake, not kill’d it,” he said.

After this declaration, he fell silent, not looking at me, but rather the traffic coming our way.

The attendant squeezed past us. The train lurched, and I fell against Jeeves and was forced to cling to him in a manner that might have been awkward, except for the fact I adored it.

“Sir, I think—”

“Sorry. That’s odd,” I said, setting myself to uprights. “I’m usually quite good on trains, you know, able to stride the deck with a sailorly roll, etcetera. Oh, well. Come on, Jeeves.”

I did a debonair pirouette and made for my compartment, eager to get the good news from Ghent.

“Sir, I think it would be best if—”

I travelled on, doing my best impression of the deaf adder of Scripture and not hearkening the voice of my charmer, charm he never so wisely.

“Sir—”

I halted abruptly and looked over my shoulder. “Oh, what is it?”

Jeeves held out a handkerchief.

“Your mouth, sir.”

But tending to the Wooster maw would have to wait because just then a door opened on my left and I was gripped by the lapels and dragged into a compartment to the accompaniment of an angry cry.

_“WOOSTER!”_


	5. Chapter 5

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Warning: the hurt/comfort element starts ramping up here and will be in full swing until the very end.

“Oh, what a tangled web some people weave, Jeeves,” I said, pausing to hiss as the gauze that was making its way across my face hit especially tender terrain.

“I’m sorry, sir. Cleaning a wound is never without its discomforts.”

“Jeeves, do we always travel with enough medical supplies to outfit a small field hospital?”

“Yes, sir. To depend on local resources is, I think, unwise.”

“Right ho.”

I looked down at the raiment and sighed.

“Sir.”

Though the command was unspoken, I did as bid and looked up. Jeeves began gently dabbing ointment on my cheek with a cotton-tipped stick.

“The suit will live to fight another day, Jeeves, but the tie must be buried before sunset.”

“Yes, sir.”

“I know there’s never a time when ties don’t matter…”

“Ties matter. Trousers matter. You matter more, sir.”

Well, you could’ve knocked me down with a feather, that is, if someone else hadn’t already beat you to it and knocked me down with a fist.

“Do you know who Ruth Van Aldin’s husband is?” I asked, steering the conversation toward calmer waters and away from rocks that would have me throwing my arms around Jeeves and smothering him with kisses.

Jeeves spoke as if he were reading aloud from a newspaper.

“The Honourable Derek Kettering, only son of Lord Leconbury.”

“Good Lord, Jeeves!”

I jumped, and the stick went into my eye—the other eye. Writhing in agony, I exclaimed,

“Do you know absolutely everything?!”

“I really couldn’t say, sir. I’m very sorry, sir. If you will kindly remove your hands it will be easier…”

“Oh, all right. Put the vile jelly back in, Jeeves. Forthwith.”

“Very good, sir.”

I allowed Jeeves to resume his ministrations, and he explained his apparent omniscience.

“I am on friendly terms with Mister Kettering’s valet, Pavett. Pavett was, in fact, a kind of mentor to me when I was younger. He served Lord Leconbury for many years and when his Lordship became ill, his Lordship begged Pavett to go to his son. Pavett did, very reluctantly, I might add. His Lordship is not expected to live much longer. I expect that Pavett will retire from service altogether when his Lordship is no longer with us.”

“Yes, well, I can understand that. I bet he’s worn out. Being ol’ Googly Kettering’s man is a dashed sight rummier than being Bertram Wooster’s.”

“There is no comparison, sir.”

“I knew Googly at Oxford. We called him Googly because his balls were always going off in a wild direction and because things with him weren’t always…”

“Cricket, sir?”

“You said it. We were on the same staircase. He, as the Canon says, ‘deliberately tasted two worms and had to leave by the next town drain’ at the end of his first year, the two worms tasted being the Dean’s sweetheart and the Junior Dean’s mother.”

“Surely one offense was sufficient, sir.”

“They were all caught together, ménage-a…” I whistled.

“Ah, Mister Kettering is much like the poet Byron, ‘mad, bad, and dangerous to know’?”

“Yes. And it’s in the blood. All the family are a bit potty—mad gamblers, you know. In the old days, they used to gamble away their wives and their estates and do the most reckless things just for the love of it. When I saw Ruth Van Aldin, I had the feeling I had danced at her wedding, and I had. It was well over ten years ago. I don’t remember precisely, of course, but I imagine that before I swung a dashed efficient shoe, I also knitted the brow a bit and chewed the lower lip dubiously, feeling that the poor girl ought to have been warned while there was still time. But, to be fair, based on what she told us about her divine pash. for this Comte de la Roche, perhaps the sauce should have cooked the goose and the gander.”

“Indeed, sir. If I may take a liberty, regarding the union, I believe a comparison to Lord Wotwotleigh is apt one. Bandage?”

“Let me view the damage.”

Jeeves brought a mirror.

For the unfamiliar, Lord Wotwotleigh is a character from a play, an impecunious peer endeavouring to marry a wealthy American heiress. It had given my friend Chuffy Chuffnell a complex about wooing his own American heiress.

“So, he had the title and the estate but no cash,” I said. “And she, though nursing a broken heart, had the cash and fancied a title and estate. And now neither can stick it. And both are behaving rather badly.”

“So it would seem, sir.”

“Unfortunate, Jeeves.”

“Yes, sir.”

“I mean my face.”

“That, too, sir.”

“Well, the monocle will hide it.”

“Sir, are you certain it won’t pain you to wear it?”

“It’ll hurt like the dickens, but the alternative is to go to dinner with an up-and-coming shiner and I don’t there are shades pink enough to erase this baby. No bandage, I think.”

“Very well, sir. Hold this to the area. It will reduce the swelling. Shall I change your tie?”

“I don’t suppose it matters.”

I caught Jeeves’s eye and made my lips into a cheeky pucker. He responded by lifting his eyebrow one-eighth of an inch, which in the language of the Jeeveses is the equivalent of batting eyelashes and twirling a parasol, that is, pure coquetry.

“What I mean to say is, Jeeves, I’ll be dressing for dinner soon anyway, but before that, I want to get some fresh air, walk about a bit on the platform when we reach the Gare de Lyon.”

“Our arrival is imminent, sir,” said Jeeves.

“Oh, really? Well, then, I put myself, as always, in your hands. Let your bewitching art be ‘too precise in every part.’”

As Jeeves quickly set about making the pummeled master publicly presentable, I prattled on.

“I didn’t know we were so near, Jeeves. I believe this is the most interesting time we’ve ever had on this leg of the journey, the ‘here we go ‘round the City of Lights’ bit. I suppose time flies like an arrow and fruit flies like a banana and when you’re kissing a woman you’ve just met and being socked by her husband and being put back together again by your ‘well done, good and faithful,’ there isn’t much time for anything else. But do you know the rummiest thing about whole affair and, by the way, what saved you from having to use the embalming fluid that you no doubt have tucked in that kit of ours?”

“No, sir, and I am curious.”

“It was like this. Googly, clever rogue, saw me coming out of his wife’s compartment and saw my scarlet lips and put two and two together and decided to put his fist to my mazard. Very well. But while he was making all kinds of ruckus and intimating in no uncertain terms that he was going to administer a second dose of the same, the communicating door opens, and a most theatrically-looking lady pops in screaming, “Der-e-e-e-k!”

“Would that be Mirelle the dancer at the Parthenon?”

“Great Scott, Jeeves! Now I know how Watson was able to keep ejaculating for twenty years! How did you know that?”

“Pavett, sir. I believe he mentioned that, of late, his master was frequently in the young lady’s company. She is, I gather, of an exceedingly volatile temperament.”

“And Googly acted like he didn’t know she was on the train! He was so pole-axed that he let me wiggle off the hook with a ‘I’m watching you, Wooster.’”

“Most serendipitous, Miss Mirelle’s arrival, then, sir.”

“The communicating door, or so Googly claimed, was locked. He believed that she picked it.”

“Single-mindedness is an advantage in many professions, sir.”

I shook the bean, then winced at the resulting pang. “You know, Jeeves, there is a certain kind of beazel who looks upon Bertram Wooster and feels a sort of matronly swelling in her breast. She says to herself, ‘I shall, if I work very hard, be able to make something of him’ and is inspired to start the moulding process. Lady Florence Craye springs to mind. Honoria Glossip, too.”

“Yes, sir.”

“On the other end of the spectrum—it is a spectrum that has two ends?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Yes, on the other end of the spectrum are those of the delicately nurtured, like Mirelle, who take one look at Bertram and, though they can see that he is stagnant with the ready, of which they are usually quite fond, issue a firm _nolle prosequi_.”

“There may be something in what you say, sir, but is the latter phenomenon undesirable?”

“Just an observation, Jeeves. Like the fact that I don’t suppose Ruth Van Aldin, that is, Ruth Kettering knows her husband is on the train.”

“I doubt she would arrange to meet that gentleman on a train if she knew her husband to be a passenger, sir.”

“I don’t know. These are deep waters, Jeeves. What do you think Googly’s doing here? Coincidence?”

“Hardly, sir. I suspect that he is gathering information that would aide him in either preventing the divorce proceedings or seeing that the ruling went in his favour.”

“Huh. Suppose, Jeeves, that you were Googly.”

“The contingency is very remote, sir.”

“Yes, well, humour me. Imagine that you are penniless yourself, but married to an extremely wealthy wife, but that wife proposed to divorce you, with excellent reasons, what would you do about it?”

“I should endeavour, sir, to make her change her mind.”

A shudder went through me. “By peaceful or by forcible methods?”

“You will excuse me, sir, but a gentleman would never do anything low.”

“Perhaps. But would a gentleman bring his mistress along to spy on his wife and her lover? Would a gentleman defend an honour that he himself was in the very process of besmirching with fisticuffs and threats?”

We held each other’s gaze for a long, poignant moment, then Jeeves said,

“A tangled web, indeed, sir. We’ve arrived at Gare de Lyon.”

* * *

The keen cold air was refreshing, and I hoped it was serving to deflate the cheek.

As I paced, I thought of Ruth Kettering and wondered what her plans were. Would she stay in Paris and wire her father? Would she return to London? Or travel on to the coast?

I got at least part of an answer when I observed a dinner-basket being handed up and received through the window of a compartment by a tall, thin, spoon-like figure.

That maid. What was _she_ up to?

I shook my head and immediately regretted it. The pain was a reminder that I’d meddled enough in the affairs of Ruth Kettering. I vowed that until decanted in Nice, I would confine myself to the affairs of Bertram Wooster alone.

And maybe get a bit of reading done.

* * *

As I dressed for dinner, I learned that Jeeves had made no such vow.

“I spoke with Mrs. Kettering,” he said.

“And?”

“She spoke through the door, declining to open it. She said that she did not wish to be disturbed for any reason until morning.”

“She could be mending her broken heart. Or she could be entertaining a persistent Comte de la Roche.”

“It is as you say, sir.”

“Have you seen the ol’ barnacle, Jeeves? I want to wear the mask at dinner.”

“Here it is, sir.”

I don’t know if you’ve ever seen anyone stud a shirt as if Melancholy had marked him for her own, but it’s a pitiful sight. When the tie had been tied, I finally found words.

“I know she’s gotten under your skin, old thing, but all in all, I think we’ve done rather well at leading Ruth Kettering to water; the drinking business is, quite frankly, her own.”

“Very true, sir. Enjoy your dinner.”

Sometimes, a pair of upper lips are a bally nuisance, especially when they’re being extraordinarily stiff and not touching at all like they’d like to be.

“Thank you, Jeeves,” I said softly and exited stage left.

* * *

My vis-à-vis for dinner was a lovely member of the delicately nurtured with a pair of stunning grey eyes. And to my surprise, she’d brought a very elegant companion to dinner and that companion was none other than _DEATH ON A TRAIN!_

“What ho! How lucky am I to share a meal with one who possesses such exquisite taste in literature?” I cried as I took my place opposite her. “I am reading the very same story, but you’re much farther along than I am. Don’t tell me anything. My name’s Wooster, by the way, Bertram Wooster.” I tapped the ol’ wishbone and gave her a hearty look through the porthole.

“I am Katherine Grey. It’s nice to meet another fan of detective stories, Mister Wooster. They amuse me so.”

We chatted of our mutual interest for some time, comparing Earl Stanly Gardner with Rex West and discussing the feasibility of removing the venom of a cobra before your archenemy has had the opportunity to drop it down your chimney.

When that well of conversation ran dry, I moved onto the more traditional.

“Do you know the Riviera well?”  

“No,” she said. “This is my first visit.”

“Right ho!”

“You go every year, I expect.”

I admitted as much.

“I have always lived in the country,” she said. “January and February aren’t any more inspiring there than they are in London, I suppose. Mostly mud.”

“What made you suddenly decide to travel?”

“Money. For ten years, I have been a paid companion with just enough money of my own to buy myself some strong country shoes; now I have been left what seems to me a fortune. I’ve never seen much of the world. And for once in my life, I wanted to do what everyone else did: go to the Riviera for the winter.”

“Forgive me for asking, but was it your employer who left you the money?”

“Yes. She was one of the original shareholders in Mortaulds. Forty years ago, she must have had an income of eight or ten thousand a year. She never, I am sure, spent more than four hundred a year. She was always terribly careful about money. I always believed that she was obliged to be careful about every penny. I was wrong, Quite wrong, really.”

“And all this time, you’ve been cooped up in…?”

“St. Mary Mead, Kent.”

“Gosh!”

“And before you ask, there isn’t a Miss Marple, and things don’t happen in St. Mary Mead. I should know, I’ve been nowhere else for the last decade.”

“And now you’re going to see the world! How fabulously romantic!” I couldn’t help but think that if Rosie M. Banks ever met Katherine Grey, the former would have half of her next novel plotted out.

“Yes, I am going to start with a visit my cousin, Lady Tamplin, in Nice.”

“Oh, I know Lady Tamplin! My cousins Claude and Eustace went to school with her current mister, Chubby. He’s a rather jolly cove.”

“I believe he’s meeting me at the station in Nice.” She suddenly looked at her plate. “You must forgive me, Mister Wooster, I seem to be talking a rather lot about myself.”

“Nice change, I expect.”

She looked up and, like Jeeves, she had a quiet, reflective gaze that was difficult to read, and, also like Jeeves, she exuded a kind of quiet serenity, though Jeeves’s q. s. usually has a bit more starch in it.

“Another impertinent question: was your lady considered ‘difficult’?” I asked.

“Yes,” said Katherine Grey.

“Companions came and went. Pinched her silk socks, etcetera. Until you.”

“Yes. Though it wasn’t silk socks. How did you know?”

“You remind me a lot of my valet. And someone once said that snake-charmers are born, not made.”

“Your valet?”

“Yes, he’s by way of a companion, too.”

It’s sounded so hollow, so terribly wrong, I hastened to add,

“I’d be lost without him. Truly. To give you an example…”

I launched into one of my yarns, and she listened like the paid companion she wasn’t anymore.

* * *

When I finished my tale, there was coffee before us and my companion’s grey eyes were shining like the fur of a well-groomed feline. “Ah, so he’s your Watson!” she teased, adding in a mock masculine tone, “’I’d be lost without my Boswell!’”

I laughed. “No, no, he’s the Holmes behind the throne. I’m mentally negligible.”

She shook her head slowly.

“You don’t strike me as mentally negligible, Mister Wooster, and I’d be willing to bet some of my new-found fortune that your valet doesn’t think so, either.”

I smiled. “You flatter me, Miss Grey. Now, speaking of your new-found fortune, I must warn you that your cousin—”

“Yes, I know. I’m no fool. I’ve already received letters from my late employer’s family saying they are going to contest the will. My solicitor says their claims are rubbish, and I’m inclined to agree. And I’m aware that my cousin’s motives for extending this invitation, after not having any contact with me since childhood, are less than pure. But why shouldn’t I take her up on her offer? I want to see something of the world, and it will be heavenly to get into the sunshine.”

This was a very sensible lady. No wonder her employer loved her. And left her all her money.

“Well that sounds all right. Now tell me where you’d like to go after Nice.”

After dinner, I went to the club car. The Blue Train is quite famous for its passenger list. Royalty, film stars, artists and writers, the crème de la crème, but, though the chair was soft and the music fine and the ambience everything to be hoped for on a luxury ferry on wheels, I wanted none of it.  I smoked one resolute cigarette, then marched back to my compartment.

My bed was prepared for the night.

“Jeeves?”

Though only two paces away, he still oozed in.

“Yes, sir.”

“Good Lord, man, you look a fright! Did you pack the flask?”

“Of course, sir.”

“Do you need a nip? You look like you do. Old Marley’s ghost been about?”

“No, thank you, sir.”

“Then prithee why so pale and wan? Still fretting over American heiresses and cursed gems?”

“I have a toothache.”

Now, this was a lie. Jeeves didn’t have a toothache any more than he’d been reading _Love’s Captive_ by Mrs. Arabella Richardson. Such a bare lie meant that Jeeves didn’t want to talk about it, and that was fine with me because I had something else I wanted to talk about.

“Are you retiring, sir?” asked Jeeves.

“Yes.”

“I have another cold compress ready, should you wish it.”

“Oh, yes, let’s try not to scare the natives in the morning with our mottled visage, shall we?”

“A noble aim, sir.”

I started peeling out of the fish-and-soup and wasted no time in getting my shirt and my decision off my chest.

“Jeeves, I met a very nice lady at dinner. She was a paid companion to a cantankerous, if that’s the word I want, old woman for ten years. Her employer died and left her all her money, which turned out to be quite a lot, and now the companion is seeing the world, as it were, for the first time in her life.”

“Very touching story, sir.”

“Yes, and it got me thinking. I’m the last of the Woosters. Issue will not issue, if you catch my meaning, and so when I die, I want you to have the opportunity that Miss Grey has right now. First thing when we get back to London, I’ll have the papers drawn up.”

I felt the weight of his stare, then he said,

“But, sir, your family?”

“There are aunts. There are cousins. You come first. Or last, depending on how you look at it. I mean, it’s unto half of my kingdom now, but that’s not enough when I’m gone.”

There was a muscular spasm about his mouth. “The words seem wholly inadequate, but thank you, sir.”

“You’re welcome, Jeeves,” I said as I slipped into a pair of gent’s fine traveling pyjamas. “Of course, now I must take care that you do not murder me in my sleep.”

The colour drained from his visage.

“Never, sir,” he swore, expelling the words as if they were his last before the firing squad got down to business.

“Oh, dash it all, it’s me, man! What in heaven’s name is the matter?” I cried.

He stared at me like the cat i’ the adage, but never has letting ‘I dare not’ wait upon ‘I would’ looked so agonising.

Anger fled. Pity took hold. “Is it _still_ Ruth Kettering?” I asked softly.

He nodded. “I will not rest easy until I see her in the morning.”

I thought for a moment, then suggested, “Why don’t we play Bingo’s Uncle?”

“Very well, sir. Shall I marry a cook or cut off my nephew’s allowance?”

The jest eased my growing anxiety a little. But only a little.

“You can read aloud to me,” I explained. “It will be distracting.”

“What shall I read, sir? _Only a Factory Girl_?”

“Don’t talk rot, Jeeves.”

“No, sir. Your most recent acquisition, I suppose?”

“No. Yours. The one I gave you. This is about easing your mind, not mine. I’ll be in dreamland by the second page.”

“No doubt, sir. An excellent suggestion.”


	6. INTERMISSION: PORN

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The is another stand-alone porn chapter. 
> 
> Warnings for hand jobs, role-reversal play & drag play, and oral sex.

I discovered that the best part about having Jeeves read aloud to me was that I could ogle him to my heart’s, well, heart and other parts, content. I curled at one end of the berth, studying his profile while he stationed himself at the other end, the end nearest the door, with my feet in his lap and his attention on the printed word.

Have I mentioned Jeeves’s voice? No? How remiss of me!

Jeeves’s baritone when he is addressing an audience of one is much like a Turkish bath: rich, soothing, redolent—if that’s the word I want, a sort of vocal Hammam’s Bouquet, if you catch my meaning—and apt to beget naughty thoughts.

And so it was that before I drifted off, letting sore labour’s bath do its work, the picture house of my mind played a few highlights from some of our riper encounters.

* * *

“Did you enjoy yourself, sir?”

I hummed. “I love celebrating the happy conclusion to love’s own dream, Jeeves, as long as I’m not the one at the centre of the altar rail.”

I stood in front of the full-length mirror, frowning and trying to focus the Bertram-like blur in the glass. The champagne, as is often at such gatherings, had flowed rather freely.

“These modern, new-fangled buttons, Jeeves, are the—who is the fellow with the heel?”

“Achilles?”

“Yes, Achilles’ heels of the relics of the Empire such as Bertram Wilberforce Wooster.”

“Shall I assist you?”

I grunted my assent, then added in a slurred voice, “Your hands, Jeeves.”

Of course, he understood. What I meant to say is, I love your magnificent hands, Jeeves.

“Thank you. I aim to give satisfaction.”

“Do you give anything but the good ol’ s., Jeeves? Good Lord. May I take a liberty?”

“I was about to ask the same of you.”

An umbrella of a smile split the Wooster mazard in two, and I leaned back against him.

“This dressing and, sometimes, undressing the master like a doll. Do you fancy it at all? I mean, exactly where does it rank amongst your duties and responsibilities? It must be more amusing than the beating of the rugs but quite possibly less than the pressing trousers?”

The hands in the mirror stopped.

“I like it very much.”

The words were soft and low, more breath than sound.

A confession, then.

I shivered into pieces, but then swiftly re-combobulated.

After a sincere confession, as any good man of the bespoke Saville Row cloth knows, the best thing is to offer a bit of the same and then move as quickly as possible onto other matters.

This I did. Forthwith.

“Well, I like it, too. Now your turn. What was your liberty?”

“This.”

His hands rubbed slowly up and down the front of my trousers, outlining the growing bulge ratherly nicely, like a master potter at the wheel.

“In the mirror, Jeeves?”

He hummed, then paused and asked politely, “Unless you have any objection?”

“My only fear is that I’ll like it so much that I’ll want it to become a habit and end up as obnoxious as a Peke before the dinner bell.”

“The contingency is small one, but should that be case, I shall employ the proper _discipline_.”

“Jeeves!” I groaned, hardening at his delicious pronunciation of the last _mot_. “Get the stuff, my good man, and get on with it.”

He bit the side of my neck.

“Please,” I added, not at all like a whimpering Peke.  

When Jeeves returned with slicked palms, my tumescence was feeling the cool night air, well, as cool as the night air gets beneath the roof-tree with the windows shuttered in the middle of the metrop.

I closed my eyes and gave myself over to Jeeves’s tender care. His strokes were hard and tight and so bally earnest, I started to swoon, with his breath ragged in my ear.

“You _do_ like this,” I observed. “Fantasy of yours?”

“Yes, I confess the sight is as arresting as imagined—if not more.”

“Well, I’m finding that I quite like listening to you pant and snort like Bluebottle winning the Cambridgeshire. I suppose that makes us a pair. For better, worse?”

“Sickness, health.” He kissed my cheek without slowing his pumping.

“Love, cherish?” I breathed as my body tensed.

“Till death,” he replied as my prick spent. “Small, large. French, English.”

I looked down at the mess and sighed.

“Thank goodness all things wait on those who come, Jeeves.”

* * *

On my birthday, I am allotted one solid ravishing by Jeeves. Some years, I place a request, such as the time I was rendered sorely out of tune against the piano after the sensational debut of my own medley of the songs “Muskrat Ramble” and “Yes, We Have No Bananas.” I can now never hear either song without doing myself a mischief; those of my inner circle unfortunate enough to witness a public display of this usually attribute it to my mental negligibility; the strangers in my midst chalk it up to a case of Victorian-style fits.

Some years, such as the previous one, I leave the exact nature and timing of the ravishing up to Jeeves. As a rule, I’m not much of a lad in the morning, I think that ‘listless’ is the word that about sums up my demeanour before ten o’clock. But when you wake up next to a nude octopus and find yourself shucked out of your grey pin-striped pyjamas and launched into the dream of the fisherman’s wife before you’ve even cracked an eye, well, you rise to the occasion. And so does your prick. Thrice, if you’re as blessed as Bertram in the refractory department. I mean, the lather that Jeeves drew from the pores that morn was diluvial, much like that of Saint Sebastian’s Arrow the year he won Epsom and had to be hosed down by the fire brigade. On the morning to which I refer, the fire brigade could have broken down the door to Wooster bedchamber and doused me well and good and gotten no joy for their efforts, for until Jeeves forced one of his Specials down my throat, I was in a kind of coma, like a sailor who has angered the gods and has been forced to pass through Scylla and Charybdis only to be vomited up, a mauled and penitent shadow of his former self, upon some forgotten shore.

And some years, by mutual agreement, Jeeves and I share a rather nice meal at home; retire to the sitting room to read a chapter or two of improving and non-improving books, respectively; and tuck into the master’s bed for gentle frigging and kisses good-night. I mean, as the fellow said, life’s not all original compositions and creatures of the deep, what?

* * *

The twenty-eighth of December is a rather special day in the household. That is the day that Jeeves and I close the doors, draw the curtains, disengage the telephone, and are at home to no one. That is the day, in the spirit of boy bishops everywhere, that Jeeves and I switch roles.

In the morning, I bring Jeeves his cup of Bohea and his eggs and b. I draw his bath. I even press trousers—not his actual trousers, of course, we have a pair of very loud checked ones that get drawn out for the purpose, and domestic demi-god that I am, I somehow manage to put a scorch mark in a different spot each year.

Jeeves amuses himself by practicing his golf putting, throwing cards in a top hat, playing “Sonny Boy” on the piano, and saying things like, ‘Isn’t it high time the floor was swept?’ in a theatrical upper crust accent.

But amidst the ironing and the sweeping and the rest of the domestic drudgery, Jeeves takes a liberty. In fact, he takes _every_ liberty. My bottom is pinched or grabbed or slapped every time I happen to waltz by him. I can be in the kitchen, sleeves rolled up, hard at the scullery work when he strides in, grinds his prick into my cleft, shoves me onto the kitchen table, yanks down my trousers—I never wear underclothing on this day for obvious reasons—and sods me like a guinea’s worth of penny stamps.

And then there’s the knob polishing. His prick gets a good rubbing before—and after—I set about every handle, grip, and knocker in the home.

For lunch, Jeeves biffs off to the Junior Ganymede Club to pal around with his fellow valets and a few butlers. While he’s gone, I usually give myself a good scrub and partake of a short restorative sleep in preparation for the matinee performance.

The most recent observance was a bit different for, you see, I had a surprise waiting for Jeeves. When he returned from Curzon Street, he found Bertram outfitted in a French parlour maid’s costume, a confection of dark silk and white lace cast off from the wardrobe department of one of Catsmeat Potter-Pirbright’s provincial tours. I had also applied a bit of greasepaint and a blonde wig to round out the effect.

“Oh, hello, sir,” I said in a breathy soprano. “How was your lunch?”

The keeper of my heart froze, staring wide-eyed like he’d been blackjacked by an American gangster, like he was truly ignorant of that which had just struck him. And then, when blood started to flow in his handsome corpus again, no doubt, pooling in the nether regions, the wickedest of smiles curled his lips.

I trembled in my Parisian pinny. Then my tyger, with his fearful symmetry, pounced and, to mix the metaphor, rode me like Georgie Whippoorwill atop The Wife of Bath the year they won Ascot.

And let’s just say that even by the exceedingly low bar set for the day, very little housework got done that afternoon, and the cleaning closet was down one feather duster.

The farce ended, as it usually does, with a nice meal, delivered from Claridge’s this time, if I recall correctly, and then Jeeves and I took brandy and cigars in the sitting room. We retired, as always, each to his own lair and woke to resume life as if absolutely nothing had happened.

* * *

Despite all the wonders Jeeves works, he is not, in fact, infallible. Nor is every duet of ours free from jarring notes. We have our share of mishaps, missteps, and misunderstandings. Take for example the night I returned home from the Drones and was well into my final brandy and s. when one of my shirt studs cried mutiny and dove for the carpet beneath my chair. There I was, hunting the insurgent, when Jeeves entered and mistook my hindquarters in the air for an invitation. And here I must confess that my reaction to receiving an RSVP for a soiree that I didn’t know I was hosting was a bit intemperate. Beet-red faces and muttered apologies and we didn’t look each other in the eye for a week. And then there was the time that I discovered, as the boys say, the hard way that ‘beating the rugs’ means exactly that.

But we learn on our mother’s knee that there is a time for everything, and so there are times when Jeeves and I get it wrong, but there are also times when we get right. And one of the latter is what I like to call ‘The Mermaid in the Bath.’

I usually make my choral selection from the popular songbook of the day, occasionally dipping into jaunty hymns from my youth, but on that morning, I was inspired to set verse to a melody of my own.

Inspired, perhaps, because the bath was, as baths go, perfection. Not too hot, not too cold, not too shallow, not too deep, and with just one drop of intoxicating fragrance, a novel tincture that Jeeves had pillaged from somewhere fruity, its aroma calling to mind sirens and pirates and briny bliss.

It was a perfect bath, as I mentioned, a bath that made a bather feel as if God was in his heavens and all was right with the world. I mean to say, I felt so grand I might’ve put my shirt on a pony called Long John’s Cutlass, even at 100 to 1.

And so I sang,

_“Who would be_

_A mermaid fair,_

_Singing alone,_

_Combing her hair_

_Under the sea,_

_In a golden curl_

_With a comb of pearl,_

_On a throne?”_

Jeeves entered with the soft cough that is his stock in trade.

“Good morning, Jeeves.”

“Good morning.”

It was yo-ho-ho and a bottle of rummy, though I didn’t realise it at first. Jeeves was messing about with towels, his back to me, and then it hit me: _the towels didn’t need to be messed with_. I required nothing, and nothing was amiss in the environs.

“Jeeves?”

“Yes?”

“Everything all right?”

“Yes.”

Well, there was nothing for it but to launch into song, a repeat of the first stanza, and finish my ablutions, but Jeeves didn’t stop his napery fussing. So when the corpus was clean, I pushed off to the far end of the tub and schooled my voice into its most amber, sailor-serenading tone.

“ _Who is it loves me? who loves me not?_ ”

Jeeves turned.

I gripped the edge of the tub and pushed myself up, my mouth forming a most perfect piscine-puckered O in preparation for receiving a one-eyed sea-snake that was quickly being released from its confines.

You mayn’t believe it, but Jeeves made nary a sound as I bobbed and sucked. And the end wonder of it all was that we never touched, save for my mouth to his prick. It is a mystery to this day where Jeeves’s hands were the whole time and how I managed to bring him off like a fountain without a single drop of bath-sluice, or Jeeves sluice, for that matter, dampening his garb.

As soon as Moby Dick made his big splash, so to speak, I pulled off and sank down into the water, releasing the bitterness into the murk and immediately heading for shore.

I took the proffered towel and dried the vessel, which was oddly undisturbed by whole affair, and finished my shanty.

_“Till that great sea-snake under the sea_

_From his coiled sleeps in the central deeps_

_Would slowly trail himself sevenfold_

_Round the hall where I sate, and look in at the gate_

_With his large calm eyes for the love of me.”_

Jeeves just stood there, like a stuffed frog, until I broke the spell with,

“How’s the weather, Jeeves?”

And he replied, in his usual gentleman’s personal gentleman fashion,

“Exceptionally clement.”

* * *

But I don’t want to give the impression that it has be a special occasion, a holiday or a birthday or even a perfect bath, for things to go right. Jeeves and I once got it quite right on an ordinary Sunday afternoon.

I’d been studying The Pink ‘Un and trying to remember the punch to a joke about a horse named How’s Your Father and a soft hat before Goodwood when I looked over at Jeeves, who was doing something domestic at the table.

And that was all there was to it.

I hied to the bedroom, divesting myself of apparel with every step and Jeeves followed in my wake, doing the contortionist trick of gathering up my discarded clothing while ridding himself of his own.

I threw myself onto the bed and rolled onto my back and exhaled a long, satisfied groan when Jeeves slid atop me. My limbs did their best imitation of a clinging vine and I kissed him. And kissed him. And kept on kissing him.

“Shall I ever call you Reginald? Or Reggie?” I asked as he reached for the necessary lubrication and began to fashion a slick little burrow between my clasped thighs.

He stopped, then shook the onion. “It would not be natural to hear.”

“Or to say, at first, at least, but I would, if you fancied it.”

He smiled and brushed my cheek with his thumb. “What I fancy,” he growled, running his hands from my prick to belly to nips and then pushing my arms up to continue the journey along those peninsulas of soft flesh. “is to _fuck_ you all afternoon, _Bertram_.”

He hardly ever says the words ‘fuck’ or ‘Bertram’, but when he says them together, it electrifies me.

I caressed his back and shoulders, then my hands traveled south and gripped his buttocks as he sawed his prick between my thighs.

He slayed his windmill then I rubbed his chest and said hoarsely, “Flagons. Apples. The whole lot, Jeeves.” God, I love him.

He collapsed on top of me, in the way I also love, absolutely playing ash of Vesuvius to my Pompeii. I made ungentlemanly noises. He kissed the side of my face and toyed with a nip.

“Jeeves,” I groaned.

He slid out of the saddle in much the same manner of Francois Farthingspent did the year he and Banjolele lost St. Ledger, and rolled me on my side.

“It had to be you,” he whispered as he took the master’s serf in hand and gave it the ol’ feudal spirit. He bit my shoulder ridge, then licked the bitten skin and add, “Made for fucking. Made for loving.”

And so, since it seemed to be so bally ordained by Providence, we indulged in both fuck and loving until tea became dinner and dinner, supper.

* * *

I half-surfaced, drawn out of a reverie I didn’t want to end by the throbbing between my legs. I heard a noise that might have been my own moan and turned to the wall, beckoning sleep to rid me of my nuisance lust.  

But then the bedding unsettled, and something caressed my hip. It wasn’t the dry caress of a hand, but the wet lick of a mouth that had nuzzled its way beneath a gent’s fine traveling pyjamas.

I rolled back, yanked my trousers down, then fed needy prick to hungry mouth, clawing at the bedding and gurgling Jeeves’s name into the eiderdown.

It didn’t take much. After all my lurid reminiscing, I was ready to crack like a choir boy’s soprano the Tuesday before Christmas. I clamped down on a mouthful of pillow. My hips bucked, and my prick spent.

Jeeves swallowed without a peep and was still indulging in a bit of his fav, that post-coital rooting, when I picked up the Queen Mab’s knitting needles and set about the raveled sleeve of care, feeling exhausted, sated, satisfied, prized…

…like I’d just won the Grand National. 


	7. Chapter 7

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Warning for Bertie having an anxiety attack.

I stretched my legs, and my toes struck something solid.

“Jeeves?”

My question was sleepy and slurred, but then so was the reply.

“Sir?”

“What time is it, Jeeves?”

Dark o’ clock was all that I could tell.

Jeeves removed the book that had been resting open on his chest, then slowly got to his feet. He squinted at my watch, which was hanging on the hook thoughtfully provided by the Compagnie Internationale des Wagons-Lits for the purpose.

“I’m afraid it’s stopped, sir.”

I don’t know why, but his words sent a shiver down my spine, and that shiver rapidly spread and grew in intensity until it was a sort of nameless dread which had settled in my chest, causing my breath to catch and the blood in my veins to pound violently.

I was, in that moment, an unfortunate character in an Edgar Allen Poe story and, as such, was struck by an urgent compulsion to make contact with the outside world—before the House of Usher fell, or the cat returned, or my tell-tale heart gave way.

“Jeeves, I am going to go find the conductor and asked him what time it is,” I said quickly.

I got up and threw on my dressing gown.

“Would you like me to accompany you, sir?”

I turned back. And remembering lessons learned from practically ever thriller I’d ever read, viz. don’t split up, horrible things happen to those who go it alone, I said,

“Yes, Jeeves. It’s time for all good men to come to the aid of the party.”

“Very well, sir.”

His tone was calm enough, and he gave my hand a reassuring squeeze just before I opened the door.

We stepped out into the corridor.

The whole train was wrapped in a solemn stillness, and as we crept along, passing door after door, I couldn’t help thinking about the narrow cells where the rude forefathers of the hamlet sleep.

With every step, my fear grew.

Something was wrong.

It was too quiet. Too solemn. Too still. Too empty.

Were Jeeves and I the only ones on the train?

Runaway train. Bandit train.

Ghost train.

The problem with ghost trains is that no one ever knows that they are _on_ a ghost train until the end of the story.

Was this the end of the story?

No, it was only the end of car.

“Oh, God.”

The conductor’s little chair was empty.

An alarm the strength of the Brinkley Court fire bell sounded in my chest.

I couldn’t breathe.

“Jeeves! Air! Please!”

I don’t think I actually wheezed the words aloud, though at the time, I felt them like a banshee’s shriek. Nevertheless, Jeeves guided me gently into the conductor’s seat and opened the window beside it. I gulped the cool night air like a man dying of thirst.

Suddenly, Jeeves moved closer to me, far too close for seemliness.

My first thought was that he was shielding me from whatever evil, natural or supernatural, had devoured the rest of the occupants of the train, then I looked up.

He put a finger to his lips. Then he turned his head, watching something in the corridor from whence we’d come.

Grabbing onto his thighs, I curled myself ‘round him like the deaf adder’s mute cousin and had a surreptitious peek.

A man had his hand on the door of a compartment, and with only ten compartments to the sleeper car, it was quite simple to determine, even in the dimness, that it was Ruth Kettering’s compartment. The man stood a moment or two with his back to us, seeming uncertain and hesitating, definitely a cat I’ the adage sort of stance. Then he turned, and I could see his face. Or enough of it.

Googly!

He opened the door of the compartment and passed in, drawing it to behind him.

Jeeves and I exchanged significant glances, but just for an instant, because a moment later we were sprinting down the corridor to my compartment.

Once there, Jeeves kept watch, but the wait wasn’t long. A minute more and he was ducking back in with news from the Rialto.

“He’s left,” he mouthed. Then added the wholly unnecessary, ‘Sir.’

“Already?”

Jeeves nodded.

I fell on the bed, befuddled, bed-fuddled, something-fuddled.

“Jeeves—” I murmured.

The train slackened speed, and there was the long, plaintive hiss of the Westinghouse brake.

I raised my eyebrow and Jeeves answered the unspoken query in a hushed tone,

“Lyons.”

We sat in silence for a few minutes as the train came to a complete stop. The air in the tiny box seemed too thick to support heavy respiration. It pressed upon me, heavy and woolly and sickening, like John Snow’s miasma.

The only thing worse than having a nameless dread grip you is having a dread that a nameless dread _might_ grip you.

I waved at the window, and Jeeves tended to it.

Again, I quaffed beaker after beaker of night air and watched a young man in an overcoat and cap pacing up and down the platform, stretching his legs, no doubt, while I stretched my lungs.

That night air acted like the balm of Gilead once more, and my uneasiness was quelled.

I closed the window and collapsed back onto the bed.

Jeeves joined me and we, quite literally, put our heads together.

“Why is Googly going into his estranged wife’s compartment in the middle of the night, Jeeves?” I whispered.

His reply mirrored my own swift, soft speech. “I don’t know, sir.”

“He didn’t knock.”

“No, he did not, sir.”

“If my estranged husband bunged into my train compartment in the middle of the night without knocking, I’d be alarmed. Quite a bit of hue, Jeeves, and no little cry would go up.”

“A natural reaction, sir.”

“I didn’t hear any hue or cry. Did you?”

“No, sir.”

“And Googly wasn’t in there for very long.”

“No, sir.”

“But he’s a bad lot.”

“Very true, sir.”

“If the Comte came back and _he_ was in there with Mrs. Kettering—”

“I would imagine a row would ensue, sir.”

“Exactly. I didn’t hear a row.”

“Nor did I, sir.”

“Could Mrs. Kettering be sleeping?”

“Possibly, sir.”

“Sound sleeper, then.”

“Or perhaps she’s taken a draught, sir?”

“Ah, like the poet Keats says, ‘emptied some dull opiate to the drains’?”

“Exactly, sir.”

“After her day’s tumult, I think that makes sense, Jeeves.” Then a dark thought occurred. “You don’t think she would actually, you know, opt for the ol’ hemlock martini.”

“Mrs. Kettering did not strike me as someone who would take her own life, no matter how bleak the circumstances.”

“Not really a sensitive plant, more of a fighter, what?”

“Precisely, sir.”

“So, let’s see, Googly went in there to have it out with the soon-to-be former missus and changed his mind when he saw her snoring?”

“It is possible, I suppose.” It seemed rather unlikely to me, too. “Or perhaps he didn’t find her there,” said Jeeves.

“Oh! I hadn’t thought of that. That, too, makes sense. It would explain why he didn’t stay very long. Do you think she fled with the Comte?”

“She might have left alone and of her own accord to be reunited with her father. Maybe at Dijon.”

I studied his face. “You’re worried?”

“Yes, sir.” He paused, and it was very, very pregnant pause. I waited. “I have taken a liberty, sir.”

I stared at him. “What kind of liberty, Jeeves?”

“A serious one, sir, but, and here I throw myself upon your mercy, I’d prefer not to disclose the details at present, sir.”

I was silent upon a peak in Darien.

Jeeves had never, ever thrown himself on my mercy!

I got a second jolt and realised it was the train bucking out of the station.

I made one last plea for truth.

“Jeeves, is it like the time you made me ride eighteen miles on a bicycle in the dark to procure a backdoor key that you had in your pocket?”

“It is far worse, sir.”

“You alarm me, Jeeves.”

“I alarm myself, sir.”

Dear God. What had he done? I wondered but could ask no more. The Code of the Woosters is firm on pressing confidences. So I moved discussion to what we should bally _do_ about Mrs. Kettering.

“You’d like to go and check on her?” I asked.

“Very much so, sir, but…”

“Seemliness.”

“Yes, sir.”

“Shall I ask the conductor? Say didn’t see her at dinner and wondered if she was ill.”

“It would ease my mind, sir.”

“Mine, too, Jeeves. Your concern is contagious.”

“You might, sir, perhaps ask to give a message to the lady’s maid.”

“Ah, you’re still suspicious of her, aren’t you?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Then I am, too.”

I hitched up my trousers, figuratively, of course, what I actually did was tighten the sash on my dressing gown, then made for the door.

But no sooner had I cracked the portal when I froze.

Someone was walking, no, someone was sashaying down the corridor and stopping at Mrs. Kettering’s door. The figure was wearing a scarlet kimono with dragons embroidered on the back. She turned her head my way, and I ducked back into the room. When I peeked out again, I saw a flash of scarlet silk disappear into the compartment.

“Jeeves!” I mouthed, then resumed my spying.

It wasn’t long before the kimono appeared in the corridor once more. I knew who it was ere I saw her face. Such a dressing gown could only belong to one person on the train.

“Jeeves!” I flew back to his side. “Mirelle just went into Mrs. Kettering’s compartment. Like Googly, in and out.”

His brow furrowed. He shook his head slowly. “I don’t know…”

“That’s two too many midnight visitors. And no hue, no cry, when your estranged husband’s mistress pops in for a ‘what ho!’? The lady has to be gone,” I said. “Or sleeping like the bally dead!”

There was another round of sig. g.’s exchanged.

“I’m going for the conductor, Jeeves. What is the number of Mrs. Kettering’s compartment?”

“Three, sir. Do you wish me to…?”

“No. But you’ll watch my back?”

“Always, sir.”

I shot out of the door before my nerve evaporated and, this time, found the conductor at his perch.

“We lagged in Paris, _monsieur_ , but have made up the difference very nicely since then. We should arrive in Nice on schedule, if not earlier,” he remarked with some pride after giving me the requested hour.

“Right ho. Ah, I say, the American lady in 3 was my luncheon companion, but I missed her at dinner. She’s not ill, is she?”

“Not that I know of, _monsieur_. When I came to make the beds, she had a dinner-basket in her compartment. She has not rung the bell since then. She told me that she did not wish to be wakened early in the morning, that she liked to sleep on.”

“Of course, of course. Maybe I could leave a message with her maid…”

“ _Non_ , _monsieur_. I only made up one berth. She said to me that she had been obliged to leave her maid behind in Paris.”

“Oh.” I turned away to hide my surprise, then feigned nonchalance. “Perhaps I’ll see her in Nice. Thank you very much.”

He bid me good night, and I went skipping like the high hills back to Jeeves.

“What do you think, Jeeves?” I asked when I’d told him the maid was gone.

“I do not know, sir.”

“If Ruth Kettering is with the Comte, she’d have left her maid behind. But then she wouldn’t have submitted to visits from Googly and Mirelle without a peep.”

“Very true, sir.”

“If she _isn’t_ with the Comte, then why leave the maid behind? Maybe she’s meeting him on that island where they were originally planning their rendezvous.”

“Or at his villa in Antibes, sir.”

I nodded. “But if she herself has left the train, the conductor doesn’t know about it. Or didn’t see to tell me. I mean, I suppose she could just drop off, leaving trunks behind, but that strikes me as…”

“Rash, but not wholly implausible. We cannot know the lady’s exact state of mind.”

“True. Quite the puzzle, isn’t it? I hope we get an answer in Nice.”

“Yes, sir.”

I yawned. “Jeeves…”

“Sir, would it inconvenience you greatly if I remained here while you slept?”

“Not at all. It’s a three-pipe problem, isn’t it, Jeeves?”

“Yes, sir.”

“And you without your old black clay puffer,” I teased as I tucked myself back into bed. “Or your violin. Or seven percent solution.”

Jeeves took up his previous posish at my feet.

“But I have my whetstone, sir, and that, to paraphrase the poet Frost, will make all the difference.”


	8. Chapter 8

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Warning for a dead and disfigured body.

I woke to brilliant sunshine and I woke alone. But as in London or, any other dollop of grease on the map where I happen to find myself, two minutes after emerging from the dreamless, I felt a familiar presence.

“Good morning, Jeeves. Into every life a little rain must fall, what?”

“So the poet Longfellow informs us, sir.”

“But not today.”

“No, sir.”

“And the night’s spectres seem ridic, positively sill by day, do they not?”

“They do, indeed, sir.”

“I don’t know how you do it, Jeeves.”

“Sir?”

“Look as dewy as a violet after the night we had.”

I still hadn’t forgotten Jeeves’s confession that he’d taken a grave liberty related to this business of Ruth Kettering and his subsequent refusal to reveal any details. In that horrific moment, he’d looked like the toad beneath the harrow, a feat that I would have never thought possible for a man who was always the quintessential preaching butterfly.

But there was no vestige of the amphibious now.

“I really couldn’t say, sir, but thank you, sir. We are approaching Cannes.”

“Already?”

“Yes, sir. You have slept a little longer than is your custom, and the train has made very good time.”

“How do I look?” I asked, turning the other cheek. “Ghastly?”

“Not quite, sir. The bruising and swelling are much less than might be expected.”

Jeeves produced a looking-glass, and I had to concur with his evaluation. With the monocle and a carefully-placed lid, debonair might still be the _mot juste_.

“It’s all those cold compresses, I suppose, as well as Uncle Jeeves’s Ugly-Undoing Unguent, or whatever that niffy salve was. Well, let’s get the master’s toilet and raiment underway, and then I’ll have a stroll on the platform at Cannes. I’ll breakfast afterwards. Any news of Our Lady of Ermine and Sorrow?”

“None, sir.”

I huffed, then, as was fast becoming _de rigueur_ on this journey, exchanged silent, significant glances with Jeeves.

* * *

Having suffered London’s winter gloom for months, how could I fail to be stirred by a panorama of palm trees, deep blue sea, and bright yellow mimosa? On the platform at Cannes, my heart was so light that I twirled my stick like a bandleader’s baton.

Then I looked up.

Of the whole of the train, only one window still had blinds drawn, and when I traveled down the corridor like a hound on the trail of its morning draught and kibble, I noticed the door to Ruth Kettering’s compartment was still shuttered. Hunger triumphed over concern and curiosity, however, and I passed quickly by, dedicating myself to getting on the outside of a hearty repast before I exercised the cerebellum on the R. K. matter.

But I hadn’t time for much more than a couple of after-breakfast cigarettes when the cry went up that the train was approaching Nice.

* * *

Jeeves and I disembarked. He oozed off to supervise the retrieval of the trunks, but I was left rather at a loss, wondering, for a moment, if the mystery of the Blue Train would go down in the annuals of Wooster history as unsolved.

Then a young man approached me, an underfed cove who made up for insignificance of stature by sporting a large quantity of gold lace about his uniform.

“A moment, monsieur, if you please. There are certain formalities. If monsieur would perhaps be so kind as to accompany me. The regulations of the police—” He threw up his arms. “Absurd, doubtless, but there it is.”

I called for Jeeves. He came at a canter with a small valise in hand and said something in rapid-fire French.

The man nodded. Then Jeeves and I were led toward a siding where one coach of the departed train had been shunted.

We were invited to enter the coach, but before I climbed aboard, I donned the monocle and dipped the gent’s headdress one eighth of an inch lower on the mauled side of the visage. If I was to deal with anything official, I wanted to look like a man not to be trifled with, treacled by, or otherwise éclair-ed. I may have even banged my _whangee_ once or twice on terra firma, just for good measure.

Once inside, he of the gold lace strode down the corridor and held open the door of one of the compartments. In it was a pompous-looking official personage and a nondescript clerk.

The pompous-looking personage rose and said, “You will excuse me, monsieur, but there are certain formalities to be complied with. I am M. Caux, the Commissary of Police. Pray be seated.”

Police! What did the _gendarmes_ want with B. Wooster?

While I was praying and be seated, I felt the comforting presence of Jeeves, quite literally, behind me.

“Monsieur speaks French?”

Even without a mirror, I knew there crept into my face a look of furtive shame, the shifty hangdog expression which announces that an Englishman is about massacre the Gallic tongue, but I was spared the embarrassment of revealing that after enjoying French hospitality for many years, I was still more or less at the Esker-vous-avez stage.

“He does not, but I do. I am Mister Wooster’s valet. My name is Jeeves. Here are our passports.”

Why Jeeves is so bally proficient, I’ve never rightly ascertained. When you ask him, he’ll say that his grandmother was the sister of a French painter of some note. Perhaps, but that explanation has always rung a bit hollow to me. My own theory is that it has to do with the war, which Jeeves claims to have ‘dabbled about in.’ A quick-thinking cove like Jeeves wouldn’t have been cannon fodder, he’d have been doing something clever. And I, for one, think he did his clever bit in France.

M. Caux eyed Jeeves keenly, then gave a little grunt. He took our passports and leafed through them. “Thank you,” he said in thickly accented, but intelligible English. He returned the passports to Jeeves, then turned to me. “But what I really desire is information about a lady who has been a fellow passenger of yours, Monsieur Wooster. You lunched with her yesterday.”

My breath caught in my throat.

Ruth Kettering!

What had happened to her? Police. She was either missing, injured, or…

“She returned to your compartment after lunch and you spoke with her for some time,” M. Caux continued.

“Yes, she did,” I replied.

“Can you give me an idea of that conversation?”

Sensitive plant that I am, I recognised that this was a crossroads and that I needed to pick my path with care. I did not want to give this personage, no matter his title or importance, the impression that I was the kind of English gentleman, or that Jeeves was the kind of gentleman’s gentleman, for that matter, who would stand any ranygazoo. Also, I wanted desperately to know what had happened to Ruth Kettering.

It was poker. Not my game, really, I’m more of a darts or snooker pool or toss cards into a top hat kind of sportsman but Jeeves has taught me a thing or two about holding and folding and raising the ante.

“I could but at the moment I see no reason to do so,” I said, serving it up with a thick slice of hauteur. Then I threw a glance heavy with class distinctions in Jeeves’s direction, just as the stage directions would have indicated: _[throws haughty look in direction of manservant]._

Of course, it was a bit off that Jeeves was behind me, not OP or prompt side. Inelegant, I mean to say, but nevertheless, the shot was on the board.

“Oh, yes, there’s a reason.” The Commissary rubbed his chin. He looked at Jeeves, then back at me, then seemed to make his decision. “The lady was found dead in her compartment this morning.”

“Dead!” I gasped.

This was precisely what Jeeves, that prescient cove, had feared! I had the fleeting thought that it was a crying shame that that Shakespeare chap was no longer quilling the ‘to be or not to be’s at the ol’ stand anymore, Jeeves could have rented himself out as doom’s handsome portend to half a dozen plays.

“So, you see, we are anxious for any information we can possibly get,” said M. Caux.

“How did she die?” I asked, but I knew. I knew before this Commissary, with a pair of furry caterpillar eyebrows sitting proudly atop his salad bowl of a head, allowed a pregnant silence to settle, then shattered it with the only string of words in the English language more ominous than ‘they were the footprints of a gigantic hound.’

“She was murdered.”

Those first few notes of Beethoven’s fifth thundered in my ears, so loud I almost didn’t catch Jeeves asking in French,

“It couldn’t have been suicide?”

M. Caux hesitated then shook his head and replied in English. “She was strangled.”

“Dear God,” I breathed. Then figuring that this fellow had shown quite a few of his cards, I decided to show a few of mine.

“Her name was Ruth Kettering. Her father is Rufus Van Aldin, an American businessman. I met them at Victoria Station in London. Jeeves has Mr. Van Aldin’s card.”

Jeeves produced the card. M. Caux grunted. He showed the card to the clerk, who copied down the information.

“Thank you, Mister Jeeves. The name is confirmed by her passport and the labels on her luggage. Now, do you know any more? Her state of mind, perhaps?”

“She was upset,” I said. “She was traveling to meet a man, but she changed her mind about him and the rendezvous. That was the substance of our conversation in my compartment. The man was planning to board the train at Paris Nord. Jeeves, do you still have the letter?”

“Yes, sir.”

He produced the letter, now in a delicate state of reassembly, and handed it to M. Caux.

“How did you come by this?” the Commissary asked me.

“Mrs. Kettering tore it up and dropped the pieces in my compartment after she made the decision to not keep their assignation,” I replied. “I thought she might regret it and ask for the letter back, so I had my man put it back together again.”

It was for me the work of a moment to alter the story. If anything were to go horribly wrong, and with the police in a foreign land something might always go horribly wrong, I wanted Jeeves out of this business entirely. It was my imagination, of course, that he leaned a fraction of an inch closer to me, that the heat from his body augmented my own temp. by a quarter of a degree.

M. Caux stroked his chin as he read the letter. “Did she tell you anything about this Armand?”

“He calls himself the Comte de la Roche.”

The caterpillars leapt, and the salad bowl, which was the colour of that last bit of Brie that Jeeves always insists must be binned after the party, wrinkled. “The Comte de la Roche is well known to us, but a slippery fellow, to be sure. It may be difficult to lay hands on him for questioning.”

“He is at his Villa Marina in Antibes,” I said, studying my manicure as if the sun never set on my Empire.

M. Caux’s gaze narrowed. “And how could you know anything of the matter?”

Well, when a cove sets you up like that, it would be the crime of the century to say anything other than what I did.

“My name is Bertram Wooster. It is my business to know what others do not.”

If I’d had a Mechlin lace cuff, I would have flicked it, but a hard stare through the monocle was a solid second best.

M. Caux reacted as most people do when I’m throwing my weight about, viz. he laughed heartily.

“You have your Sherlock Holmes. We have our C. Auguste Dupin. I presume Mrs. Kettering mentioned the Comte’s address.”

I conceded the point.

M. Caux gestured to the letter. “He mentions rubies.”

“Jeeves?”

In French, Jeeves related the history the Heart of Fire.

“Mon Dieu,” muttered M. Caux, the Brie starting to show a hint of perspiring strawberry. “She was travelling with them?”

“Yes, Jeeves and I saw the rubies. They were a birthday gift from her father. She kept them in a case very similar to this one.”

I brought out my monocle case.

M. Caux spoke in French to the clerk, then to us.

With a volley of words, there came a quickening in the air that I didn’t understand. The quothing Raven feeling began to steal into my bones.

“Jeeves?” I asked with no little trep.

“The Commissary would like us to identify her, sir.”

* * *

 

M. Caux and the clerk filed back into the corridor.

I stood. Jeeves’s hand rested lightly on the small of my back, just the brush of a moment, but it was enough to calm the timpani solo that had commenced in my chest.

I made for the door, not wanting to look Jeeves in the eye. Not yet.

M. Caux unlocked the door of compartment ‘3,’ and we trailed in after him.

An obscenely cheerful morning light was spilling through the now half-drawn blinds.

In the bed, the figure was lying in a pose so natural that anyone would think she was sleeping. Her bedclothes were drawn up over her, her head turned toward the wall, only a small fountain of auburn curls peeking out.

M. Caux laid a hand on her shoulder and turned her.

“Oh, God,” I breathed.

_Never seen death yet, Dickie?_

Now was my time to learn about heavy blows that mutilate noses, eyes, and chins. My knees buckled. I gripped my stick and leaned against something hard and solid.

“Mine eyes dazzle, Jeeves,” I croaked.

“Yes, sir,” he said as cool as the greenest member of the squash family.

My blood boiled.

She was dead!

She’d been in trouble, she’d come to us for help, and now she was dead, with her face beaten to a bloodless pulp! And all Jeeves could say was ‘yes, sir.’

Blast his stiff upper! To hell and back with his sangfroid!

I swallowed the rising bile and forced myself to address M. Caux in an even voice.

“Was that,” I said, gesturing to what had been only yesterday a phizzog of beauty and strength and sorrow and fear and mirth, “done before or after death?”

“The doctor says after,” said M. Caux. “Look at her well. Is this the woman you talked to in the train yesterday, Monsieur?”

“The build and hair are the same, but the face is too, too—what’s the word, Jeeves?”

“Disfigured, sir.”

“Disfigured to say for certain.”

Jeeves asked something in French.

M. Caux nodded.

I wobbled as the pillar I was leaning against, that is to say, Jeeves, abandoned its post.

Without touching anything, Jeeves began a careful study of the clothes folded at the end of the berth, the fur coat hung from a hook, and the little red lacquer hat tossed up on a rack.

“The rubies, Jeeves?”

He hummed.

“We’ve found no rubies, no case,” said M. Caux.

Jeeves dipped into the small valise he carried and produced a pair of white cotton gloves. He held them up in query at the Commissary.

M. Caux frowned but inclined his head. “Most irregular, but…”

Jeeves donned the gloves and passed into the adjoining compartment. M. Caux followed on his heels.

I stood in the threshold, relieved to have a reprieve from the sight of Ruth Kettering’s lifeless body and her ravaged face. “When Mrs. Kettering didn’t appear at dinner, I asked the conductor. He said she had ordered a dinner-basket and left her maid behind in Paris.”

“Yes,” said M. Caux. “That was the story he told us as well.”

The compartment bore the conductor’s tale out. The bed in the maid’s compartment had not been made up. Some rugs were piled loosely on the seat. There was a hat-box and a pair of suitcases.

“Perhaps the rubies are with the maid,” said M. Caux.

I bet they are, I thought, and if they are, and she’s got any sense at all, she’s far, far away from this madness.

Jeeves began turning over the rugs.

“This is most irregular,” repeated M. Caux.

“He’s very good with rugs,” I added, rather unhelpfully.

“May I borrow your monocle, sir?” asked Jeeves.

Good Lord! ‘Most irregular’ didn’t even begin to cover it! But I handed the requested over forthwith.

“Look,” said Jeeves.

M. Caux looked.

“Four auburn hairs,” he said, peering through my glass. “Madame’s? Yes, I think so. But why should Madame’s hairs not be found on her own rug?”

Jeeves tilted the bean and returned the monocle to me in a somewhat defeated manner.

“Bah, they mean nothing,” said M. Caux dismissively. “And, Monsieur Wooster, you cannot even say that the lady in that bed is Madame Kettering! For all we know, the lady may have switched places with her maid, and it is the maid who is lying there! No, no, no. We must know first!”

I walked back to the bed and gave the body one last look, but the violence to her face had erased all trace of Raphael’s Madonna.

God, it made me sick.

I wanted to claim her, to name her, but the Code of Woosters prevented me. I shook the lemon.

“I cannot be certain.”

M. Caux snorted and threw me a look, a duet of derision which gave me the royal pip, so I let the scale leap back into the eye and set the ol’ baritone to harpoon,

“But why ask me, a veritable stranger to her, when _her husband_ was on the train?”

M. Caux stared, skewered like the dead pig in the back of a butcher’s shop that he was. Then he came to life and barked at the clerk, who flipped through some pages on a clipboard.

“Non, non, non,” muttered the clerk.

Finally, I looked Jeeves squarely in the eye. The mosaic of emotion I saw there mirrored my own, but I saw something else, something that made the Wooster chest puff.

Pride.

Jeeves was _proud_ of me.

Well, I’d be damned if I would let him down. I’d fill the unforgiving minute with sixty seconds’ worth of distance run. Or burst the breath-bags trying.

“He wouldn’t have been travelling under his own name,” I said, my Mechlin-lace-flicking hauteur returning, icy and strong. “He’d be under the name of Pavett. For what’s a gentleman’s gentleman for, if not to shield the master while he’s spying on the missus?”

I didn’t twirl the stick, but I wanted to—with a hey-nonny-nonny and a hot cha-cha.

The _gendarme_ was looking fittingly agog, if only for an instant.

I glanced at Jeeves, hoping for a dash of the earlier ‘you’ll be a Man, my son,’ but was disappointed.

His attention was elsewhere.

I pivoted and followed his line of sight, recognising at once what had caught his eye.

A thin something was wedged between the end of the berth and the window.

This was it! This was the illustration of the Duke of Phthisis, or whatever his name was, from _DEATH ON A TRAIN!_

I, the debonair, monocled amateur sleuth, was on the brink of spellbinding the onlookers with my keen powers of observation. I was about to reveal the clue to solve the whole bally thing!

Knowing just how such operations are performed, I extended an open hand behind me, and my Watson laid a cambric handkerchief in my palm. Then I bent down and drew out the object by its very edge—we aficionados of the _roman policier_ know all about fingerprints.

The object was a soft blue leather cigarette case engraved with the initial K.

“Voilà!” I cried, holding it aloft but the audience was less than ejaculatory.

“Belonging to the lady, no doubt,” said M. Caux dryly, taking case and cloth from my fingertips.

“I think you’ll find hers in her handbag,” I said.

The Commissary couldn’t help it. Not having once been a typical young man about London-town or engaged to a rugger team’s worth of delicately nurtured prop forwards in his youth, he had obviously spent a lesser proportion of his life lighting ladies’ cigarettes than I had. I knew that any woman who wore a coat like that, and a hat like that, and had a lover named _Armand_ , and blithely carried half a million pounds worth of shiny marbles in a crocodile-skin bag, wasn’t going to cage her gaspers in a something so unpretentious.

In the next few minutes, my words were proved true, and M. Caux’s expression changed.

And I got my moment. A bit late, but still it was bally brilliant. But, as these things often go, it lasted the duration of a shooting star.

The dénouement, however, proved to be as sweet as the climax—if less suitable for illustration.

The Commissary regarded me with respect, not quite like that of an equal, but the earlier disdain and derision were now conspic. by their absence.

“Thank you, Mister Wooster. Now, since you seem to be such a font of information, have you any idea where Mister Kettering might be staying?”

“No, but I know where I’m staying, and Derek Kettering and I were at Oxford together. Jeeves.”

Having given the address of our hotel to the clerk, Jeeves and I were told that we were no longer needed but might be called back for further questioning.

We exited centre right.

* * *

Jeeves, once again, oiled off to see where our luggage had been stashed while we’d been enjoying police hospitality, and I was left, once again, unmoored, pacing and mulling the whole ruddy business over and over.

Jeeves came back some quarter of an hour later with a _mea culpas_ expression and a report that he was still trying to track down our things. So grimpen-mired had I been in my own thoughts, that I hadn’t frankly noticed the march of time. I told him so. He looked relieved, then, promising success, disappeared once more unto the breach.

When he returned this time, I noticed a slight ‘mission accomplished’ swagger in his stride, but then I noticed something else, more arresting, in the distance.

Googly.

Did he kill his wife to prevent her from divorcing him? Did he steal his wife’s jewels to give to his mistress—or to pay the wolves at the gate?

The image of what was now Ruth Kettering’s face flashed before my eyes.

But why the face, Googly? Why kill her, then smash her to bits like that?

He was being led by a French rozzer to the shunted train car, but when he spotted me, he charged like a bull before the matador’s flag.

“Wooster! Are you pressing charges, you spineless blighter?”

There were several obstacles to Derek Kettering’s fist once again making violent contact with Bertram Wooster’s mazard. The first was the keeper of the peace who had him pinned by the arms before he could swing, the second was Jeeves who’d nonchalantly oozed between us, the third was my _whangee_ , which was not going to sleep in my hand.

But I didn’t make a peep. I just looked at him.

He might be a murderer, but he was definitely a widower.

I watched him turn red and sputter and wondered just how bad this bad lot was.

“Get off me! What in the hell is going on, Wooster?!” he shouted as he was escorted toward the shunted coach.

When he was gone, I spoke the only word that occurred. Or mattered.

* * *

“Jeeves.”

“The luggage is on its way to the hotel, sir.”

“You should go with it.”

“And you, sir?”

My eyes rested on the window with the half-drawn blinds. “I must tell the police what I saw last night, Jeeves.”

Now some people might say that it is Bertie Wooster’s custom to speak glibly, or airily, Jeeves tells me the words are synonymous, but in that instance, I chose my pronouns very carefully.

“Sir?”

“There are wheels within wheels here, Jeeves.”

“Yes, sir.”

“And do you know what happens when there are wheels within wheels?”

“No, sir.”

“Things get crushed and torn to shreds between teeth. If something goes wrong here, I want you to go.”

“No, sir.”

“Sell everything, down to my last collar stud, and go, man.”

“No, sir.”

“Leave me, Jeeves. Like Ruth Kettering, I have a very bad feeling about this.”

“As do I. That is why I must continue to maintain a firm _nolle prosequi_ , sir.”

“Don’t be Balaam’s ass!”

“With all due respect, sir, it was Balaam who was more of an ass than the animal who served him.”

Well, he had me there. I’d won a prize for Scripture knowledge at my school and knew Balaam and his ass from soup to nuts.

“You’re fired, Jeeves. Now go.”

“As I am no longer in your employ, Mister Wooster, I am able to speak freely. One, the whole story shall not be known until Rufus Van Aldin arrives.”

“Why?”

“Because I have one of the missing pieces, and I will only reveal it in his presence.”

“Your liberty taken?”

“Yes.”

“I suppose they’ll notify him today, if Googly identifies her.”

“Yes, I expect Mister Van Aldin will arrive tomorrow. It is her, sir.”

“How do you know?”

“Yesterday, I noticed an irregular-shaped birthmark on Mrs. Kettering’s inner left wrist. The mark was on the body in the compartment as well.”

“Then why in the blazes didn’t you tell the police?”

“They would ask me why I noticed it.”

“So?”

“I would have been forced to reveal that you have an identical mark.”

“So? And, no, I don’t!”

I turned my hands over and pushed up my sleeves, one by one.

Jeeves coughed. “The mark is not on your wrist.”

My head spun. I dug my stick into the ground and leaned on it.

“Right ho,” I groaned. “Jeeves, these may be the deepest waters we’ve traversed.”

“I am forced to agree. Which is why I maintain that my place is by your side.”

I realised it was foolish to argue anymore. “So it’s half a league, half a league, half a league onward, then?”

“Yes, together, and if I may say, I’ve rarely seen you to better advantage than just now, with the Commissary.”

“Oh, yes?” The heart swelled, so I did the manly thing and stabbed at the ground a bit harder with the tip of the _whangee_.

“Oh, yes,” he echoed. Then he took one step towards me and said in a low voice, “And I would have you know that regardless of what awaits us, I scorn to change my state with kings.”

Egad, this man slayed me!

“What an insufferable blister you are, Jeeves,” I said. “Well, I, for my part—”

But I didn’t get to offer my part because our tête-à-tête was interrupted by a guttural, but nevertheless official-sounding summons from the door of the shunted car.

_“Monsieur Wooster?”_

“You’re re-engaged, Jeeves.”

“Thank you, sir. After you, sir.”


	9. Chapter 9

It commenced, I’ll admit, as a scene of two truants sitting before the schoolmaster.

Googly was pale, from shock, bewilderment, horror, or something more sinister, I couldn’t say, but his face reddened when he snorted his _j’accuse_.

“Ask Mister Wooster what he was doing kissing my wife yesterday?”

A good shot, I’ll admit, but this wasn’t my first Pat and Mike cross-talk act.

“Ask Mister Kettering what he was doing entering in his estranged wife’s compartment in the middle of the night, just before the train arrived in Lyons?

Googly turned his head. His eyes were lit with rage, nostrils flared.

“I saw you,” I said in the manner of snitches throughout history.

Googly, not to be outdone, snorted in the style of schoolyard bullies worldwide and showed that he had clearly not been absent the day when the lesson about ‘the best defence being a good offense’ had been taught.

“I saw _you_ —coming out of my wife’s compartment with my wife’s lipstick on your mouth yesterday after we reached Paris Nord.”

“Gentlemen, please,” said M. Caux, who since our last chat had called in reinforcements. There was one stone-faced uniformed long arm of the law standing against the wall of the compartment and another holding the door to the corridor open. With Googly, Jeeves, myself, the Bob Cratchit at the stand with ink and quill, and the Commissary, it was a full house, as they say, with Googly and I clearly the pair of knaves.

“Mister Wooster?” The caterpillars indicated I had the floor.

“I met Mrs. Kettering at Victoria station when her bag was snatched. My man managed to recover it.” I made a gesture toward Jeeves who had taken up a spot in the far corner, standing as silent and wooden as a chifforobe. “Mrs. Kettering was sitting opposite me on the journey to Dover, and we lunched together after the train left Calais. We talked. She took me into her confidence and said that she was regretting her arranged rendezvous with the Comte de la Roche—”

“I knew it!” cried Googly, jumping to his feet. “I knew she was meeting that bastard!”

“Monsieur Kettering, please, have a seat.”

He plopped back down in the chair. His smug half-smile made my stomach turn.

“She changed her mind,” I continued. “She decided that she didn’t want to meet the Comte, but she feared that her resolve would break if she saw him. So I suggested she write him a letter and that I would give it to the Comte and ask him to leave the train when he boarded. She said that he would protest, so I suggested that we stage a scene, a romantic scene, to drive home the point, and my man would be entrusted to give the Comte the letter and escort him off the train. That’s what ensued and that’s how it I got the lipstick on my face.”

“Monsieur Jeeves, what have you to say?” asked M. Caux.

“I saw a man fitting Mrs. Kettering’s description of the Comte board the train at Paris Nord. Per instructions, I introduced myself and presented him with Mrs. Kettering’s letter. He opened it, read the first lines, made some inflammatory remarks, then stated that he would see Mrs. Kettering whether she desired to see him or not. He advanced, I retreated. I threw open Mrs. Kettering’s door. He saw the scene of Mrs. Kettering in Mister Wooster’s embrace and lost his purpose. He left the train at once, just before it departed Paris Nord.”

M. Caux nodded. “You did not see the Comte again on your journey?”

“No, sir,” said Jeeves.

“Nor did I,” I added.

Googly curled his lip and snorted. “Coward.” Then he took a deep breath and sighed. “As fantastic as your story is, Wooster, I’m inclined to believe it. You are not Ruth’s type at all.”

Regarding the last observation, I did not say that I thanked Providence for small favours, but I thought it. Then I felt compelled to state aloud, for the record, as it were,

“As I was returning to my compartment after the scene at Paris Nord, Mister Kettering, an old chum from Oxford whom I did not know was a passenger on the train, said ‘hello’ by putting his fist to my face.”

M. Caux leaned forward. “You have a temper, Mister Kettering.”

Googly snorted; this time it was a hollow, mirthless snort. “Doesn’t everybody?”

I considered my face, and I considered Ruth Kettering’s.

No, not everybody.

Not everybody solves their problems with blows and not everybody’s calling card leaves a bruise, and in that moment, I’d never been more grateful for the Code of the Woosters; my, admittedly at times absurd and deleterious, if that means with the propensity for landing self in soup, identification as a _preux chevalier_ of the first order; and Jeeves.

“Was that your last contact with Mrs. Kettering, Mister Wooster?”

“No. She was very upset after the incident at Paris Nord and said she wished to be alone. At the Gare de Lyon, I knocked on her door to see how she was faring. I didn’t see her, but she said, through the door, that she did not wish to be disturbed until morning. That was the last contact. But I woke in the night and went to ask the conductor the time because my watch had stopped, and I saw Mister Kettering entering his wife’s compartment. He stayed for a few minutes and left.”

“Before the train reached Lyons?” asked M. Caux.

“Yes.”

“Very well. Mister Kettering, it is your turn.”

Googly looked like he was about to undergo an examination on Scripture knowledge with a list of the Kings of Judah written on the inside of his cuff. At last, or so it seemed, he decided to speak frankly.

“I did not love my wife. She did not love me. Whether we did at some point, I can’t remember. We had been living apart for many months, and the last time I saw her was more than three weeks ago when we ran into each other at club. I have a great deal of debt and rely on the security that my wife’s wealth provides regarding creditors. But I suppose, she’d had enough. Whether it was a result of her renewed association with the Comte, I don’t know. Maybe my treatment of her had caused her to seek him out again. Either way, she had just proposed to divorce me. Her father offered me a hundred thousand pounds to not contest the matter. I told him to go to hell. She and the Comte were sweethearts before Ruth and I were married, and I’d heard a rumour that she was meeting him on the Blue Train. I decided to follow her to spy on her.”

“With Mirelle,” I interjected.

Googly scowled. His neck became cords of flexed sinew. He clenched his teeth and gave every appearance of readying himself for another round in the ring, or another pass of the bull’s horns with el matador Bertram, but his act of playing the idiot, full of snorts and fury, was already wearing thin. I found that I’d had about as much of his patented brand of nonsense as the late Ruth Kettering had, that is to say, quite enough.

I sneered, as only one of my station in life can towards another of said station who is making an ass of himself. It is a gesture I have rarely employed in my career, but as I mentioned, I was at the end of my three skeins.

“You are a right chump, Googly, to bring your mistress to spy on your wife!”

Googly lunged, but the long arms of the law were sufficiently lengthy to keep him out of Bertram-throttling distance.

“Monsieur Kettering, sit down or we will conduct this interview in a cell!” warned M. Caux.

Googly snorted contemptuously and shifted in his chair, then addressed the caterpillars.

“In the beginning, I didn’t know Mirelle was on the train, but she and I are, well, friends. We have spent a good deal of time together of late.”

“She visited Mrs. Kettering’s compartment, too,” I said, studying my manicure, but feeling the heat of their stares. “After Lyons. She’s hard to miss at any time, but last night she wore a scarlet kimono with dragons on the back. She didn’t stay long either. A few minutes, no more.”

I looked up.

Googly was frowning and shaking the bean slowly, but then he seemed to remember himself and went on the attack.

“What were doing loitering about in the corridor in the middle of the night, Wooster?”

“I couldn’t sleep.”

“You’re a half-wit. You’ve always been a half-wit,” he spat.

“Doesn’t mean I’m not an insomniac,” I replied coolly, the lace-flicking calling to me like a siren. “Or that I’m _blind_.”

“I will ask the questions, Monsieur Kettering,” rebuked the Commissary. “Now, why exactly did you enter your wife’s compartment?”

Googly shrugged in the way that’s taught at a private school tutor’s knee.

“Mirelle told me that my wife was meeting the Comte de la Roche in Paris. I hadn’t seen him, just Wooster, and so I thought she was mistaken. I went to see Ruth to have it out with her once and for all, so I pushed the door open and went in. She was lying on the bunk asleep—her face was turned away from me—I could only see the back of her head. I could have waked her up, of course, but I didn’t. What was there to say that we hadn’t both said a hundred times? I left. That’s the truth. That cigarette case isn’t mine. This is mine,” he produced a silver case from a jacket pocket. “I’ve never seen the one that you showed me, and it can hardly be a gift from my wife to me. We haven’t been on those terms for years.”

“One small point. Was the door to the adjoining compartment open or closed?” asked M. Caux.

Googly considered. “Closed.”

M. Caux nodded. The caterpillars were beginning to droop. I suppose it’d already been a long day at the salad bowl.

“Do you know if your wife had a will, Monsieur Kettering?”

“She didn’t, as far as I know. And we’ve no children.”

M. Caux grunted and this seemed to be another spark to Googly’s powder keg.

“You think I killed her! Well, I didn’t! I won’t pretend that I’m overwhelmed by sorrow, but I didn’t kill her!”

“You will surrender your passport, Monsieur Kettering, until this matter is resolved, and you will not leave Nice.”

Googly snorted. Really, he had an astounding repertoire of snorts. I wondered if he practiced them or simply lived with enough natural scorn to give the whole stables a daily workout.

“Fine. Is that all?” he said.

“Yes. For now,” replied M. Caux.

It wasn’t until I’d crossed from the shadowy world of the train into the blinding light of day, the that I realised how long ago my last meal had been.

I immediately discovered I was not alone in my condition.

“Lunch, Wooster?” asked Googly.

And it just goes to show that no matter how _preux_ one is, the old school tie is a strong one, for my reply was in the positive.

“Right ho. The Negresco?”

“Naturally.”

* * *

I wasn’t surprised that Googly got on the outside of a pair of cocktails within a few moments of our sitting down. I was nursing a whiskey and s. myself when he ordered his third.

Then a woman fluttered towards us, a heavy perfume of Oriental abstraction announcing her approach. She was dressed all in orange and black, with a dark, fanciful hat that shaded her face. In sum, she resembled nothing so much as a monarch butterfly. She brought a hand up to adjust the lid, and even a blind bard couldn’t miss the gold ring with an enormous green stone that adorned her long, manicured finger.

“Dere-e-ek!”

“Mirelle,” he said, giving a snort, a new one, and evidently a vintage he reserved for the delicately nurtured.

“You are not very amiable, Derek,” she said with a pout.

“You remember Wooster.”

She gave me a look that said she would have been happier to see M. Caux’s eyebrows in her salad than one Bertram Wooster at the lunch table of her lover.

Googly drained his glass and slammed it on the table. “Did you kill Ruth, Mirelle?” he slurred.

“Oh, Dere-e-ek. How can you say such things?”

“Those rubies. The police didn’t say anything about them. And I didn’t bring them up. I assumed they’d try to catch me up about it. Ask me how I knew about them if Ruth and I hadn’t seen each other for weeks.   But I bet whoever killed her was after them and got them. Was it you? You seemed awful keen on them in London.”

“Dere-e-k, _Mon Dieu_! Is it a crime to like pretty things?”

“It’s a crime to take pretty things that aren’t yours, my dear. Why are you even here? I thought we agreed in London that rats desert a sinking ship.”

“Ah, but that is before you showed superb courage. I know what you have done for me. Our troubles are ended.”

“The rats come back, do they? Two million makes a difference. Of course, it does.”

She made to sit down.

“You’re lunching here?” he exclaimed.

“ _Mais oui_. I am lunching with you.”

“I’m sorry I’ve got an engagement. I’m lunching with someone else.”

Tactful of him to finally bring me into the conversation after he and the swallow of Capistrano had just been treating me like a potted palm.

“I’m lunching with that lady over there. We’re finished, Mirelle, and, oh, by the way, the police know you were in Ruth’s compartment last night, I’d expect to be rounded up for a chat any minute. Bye, Wooster.”

And with that, he scurried off in the direction of a lady in white who had just come up the steps. At second glance, I reallised that the lady was Miss Grey, my dinner companion from the train.

Not wanting to be in the vicinity of a tiger-striped, tiger-clawed member of the _Lepidoptera_ who’d been scorned, snubbed, and was quite possibly murderous, I mumbled an apology and exited centre right.

* * *

“Jeeves!” I cried as I crossed the threshold of the home away from home.

“Sir?”

“What ho! You look even dewier than usual.”

“I took advantage of the bathroom _en suite_.”

“Good idea. Scrubbed the train stench off?”

“Yes, sir. How was your luncheon with Mister Kettering?”

“Over before it began. I’ll tell you all about it, but first, order a late luncheon or an early tea fit for a Roman emperor and pals, pour a pair of stiff ones for thee and me, and rally round. The game’s afoot, what?”

“Undoubtedly, sir.”

When all was arranged, Jeeves sat primly at the small table, taking his nourishment, as is his custom, morsel by morsel in much the fashion of a storybook princess. But I couldn’t sit still. I strode about, taking a sip or a bite as I passed.

“Did Googly do it?” I asked.

“He benefits financially, sir.”

“But why steal the rubies? They’ll come to him anyway.”

“Very true, sir.”

“Would he smash her face like that?”

“He has a tendency towards violence, sir.”

“True. But after she’s dead? It seems…” My hands fluttered.

“The same argument could be made for Miss Mirelle.”

“True. I don’t think she gives a damn about Ruth Kettering, even enough to smash her face. Her main concern is Googly’s money and the jewels. She told Googly about his wife being given the Heart of Fire in London. She thinks Googly killed his wife for her, but at least going by the drama today at lunch, he’s already done with Rosalind and is moving onto Juliet. I don’t know, Jeeves, both Googly and Mirelle are easily provoked, but to do that to someone lying in bed asleep, unawares.” I shuddered. “It takes the kind of rage they serve up at Colney Hatch.”

“I agree, sir, a most unpleasant impulse. But the medical evidence suggests that Mrs. Kettering was killed before Lyons. That might rule out Miss Mirelle unless she entered the compartment at an earlier hour than the one you witnessed.”

“How do you know about the medical evidence?”

“While listening to the proceedings, I was also reading the files that were open in front of Monsieur Caux.”

“Good Lord, Jeeves!”

He looked unapologetic, so I moved on to the next item.

“Mason the not-maid.”

“Yes, sir.”

“Is it her, Jeeves?”

“That is my suspicion, sir.”

“She’s a thief who took the post two months ago to get close the gems, found the right moment, took them, and vanished.”

“Yes, sir.”

“Good actress.”

Jeeves shrugged.

“But not good enough to fool you,” I added. “She might not even look like that, eh?”

“Just as you say, sir. And most people who are not maids mistakenly believe that all maids bear a striking resemblance to one another.”

“You speak sooth, Jeeves, but Ruth Kettering told the conductor she left Mason behind in Paris when he made up her berth for the night. And you spoke with Ruth Kettering at Paris through the door. So, the murder took place after Paris, but before Lyons. I suppose Mason could have pretended to leave the train when Ruth told her and just hid somewhere until all was quiet? Maybe there was an empty compartment, but how could she know that? Unless she booked herself in another name.”

“Those are all possibilities, sir, but I cannot fathom why Mrs. Kettering would leave Mason behind in the first place unless she had changed her mind and was anticipating an assignation with the Comte de la Roche. Where is the sense in it? Unless Mrs. Kettering began to share my suspicion of Mason.”

“My head’s beginning to throb, Jeeves. But if Mason took those rubies, she’s long gone.”

“Possibly, sir, but then again, possibly not.”

“Well, it’s either one or the other, unless she’d done for, too, but if it was Mason, tell me this: why smash the face? Why not just take the rubies and fly?”

Jeeves shook the onion. “I do not know, sir. One disfigures without aforethought, that is, as a result of rage or madness. Or one has a purpose in it, for example, to conceal identity.”

“Well, if it’s the latter, Mason made a right bloomer because the body was identified. But that reminds me of an even greater bloomer, Jeeves. We can’t possibly be dealing with a Moriarty here because the culprit left a cigarette case behind. With an initial on it! What kind of Napoleon of Crime does that?”

Jeeves pronged a pensive forkful of salmon mayonnaise and said, “A careless one? Or one pressed for time? Or was it left on purpose to distract?”

“Red herring, you mean?”

He hummed.

“I don’t know, Jeeves. Are we making much ado about nothing and it’s just a simple train robbery? Maybe the gazelle you hunted down at Victoria Station was part of a gang who found out about the Heart of Fire. I’m certain these facts get ‘round, probably from the moment her father put the antenna out to purchase the bally things. So, the gang’s first attempt in London failed, and they decided to regroup and try again between Paris and Lyons. Hopped on the train, did the deed, hopped off at Lyons.”

“There is much in what you say. It is also obscure, sir, such as what role the Comte de la Roche played in the murder, if any.”

He sighed. I sighed.

There didn’t seem any more to say.

I dropped into the chair opposite him and finished eating.

“A bath, sir?”

“Yes, Jeeves.”

* * *

Neither the songbook of the day nor the hymnal of my youth held any allure. I soaped a meditative foot and the rest of the Wooster corpus in silence. I heard Jeeves answer the door a few times, but he didn’t interrupt the ablutions until the rinsing was complete and I was just, for lack of a more precise term, moping.

“I’m to leave you, sir. I’ve been summoned to the police station,” he said gravely.

“You?” I said, startled out of my trace. “Why?”

“If I understand correctly, the gentleman calling himself the Comte de la Roche has been brought in for questioning.”

“Ah, and they want you to pick him out of a lineup or something.”

“Just so. I hope to be back shortly.”

“You’re not going alone,” I said, springing from the waters like a salmon.

“Sir—” he began to protest.

“What about all that ‘my place is by your side’ rot you spouted earlier? It works both ways, Jeeves.”

“Very good, sir.”

“But even debonair won’t cut it, Jeeves. I want this blighter to feel every inch the rat imposter he is. I shall be flicking the Mechlin lace with impunity.”

“As you wish, sir, and may I mention that I have been in communication with my Uncle Goby via telegram this afternoon.”

“You have an Uncle Goby?” I asked as I dressed. “What does he do?”

“He is in the business of information gathering, sir. He informs me that the Comte de la Roche is, as we suspected, what one might call a stage name, and that the man himself is the son of an obscure corn chandler from Nantes.”

“Huh. Well, he’s come down in the world, hasn’t he? Blackmail, theft, and playing fast and loose with ladies’ hearts. I bet the sacks of grain at the ol’ homestead are so ashamed they’ve cut him out of the threshing floor will.”

“One can hope, sir.”

As Jeeves tied the tie, I composed aloud:

“There once was a chandler from Nantes,

Who met a Wooster with too many aunts.

His son was blighter

who was set right and righter

by a _whangee_ to the seat of his pants.”

For my bardic efforts, I got a half twitch to one side of Jeeves’s mouth.

* * *

We were shown into the lair of the Examining Magistrate’s. M. Caux of the caterpillar eyebrows was present as was the Judge d’ Instruction, whose name I soon learned was M. Carrège. The latter had no insects on his forehead, but rather looked like a croquette version of an English magistrate, the kind that would _mais oui_ and _mais non_ , but still fine me five quid for pinching a policeman’s helmet on Boat Race Night.

But as the ‘what ho’s’ went ‘round, I was less interested in the two gentlemen seated behind the desk than the one seated in front of it.

The man who called himself the Comte de la Roche looked much like I had expected, tall, dark, clad in a well-tailored if slightly flashy suit and burdened, or blessed, depending on your point of view, with a countenance of heavy-creamed arrogance that many misguided birds would, to their own peril, mistake for charm. He had what I’ve often heard referred to as ‘rakish good looks,’ which, in his case, meant a map that suggested that every ancestor of his who hadn’t enjoyed a date with the guillotine had, at some point, quipped ‘Let them eat cake’ and got one quick enough.

I had expected an unironic Byronic figure, and I had even expected the sharp churn of the Wooster intestines upon first viewing said Casanova, but what I hadn’t expected was the pair of crutches that were propped against the desk and the white bandage that dressed an unbooted foot.

I was drawn out of my puzzlement by Jeeves’s voice. The inquiries were conducted in the Gallic tongue, nevertheless, I managed to muddle through most of it.

“…at which point, the gentleman lost his balance and fell.”

“You threw me off the train!” the Comte cried. “He’s a brute! I ought to press charges.”

“It was an unfortunate accident. The train was just leaving Paris Nord.”

M. Caux and M. Carrège threw glances at Jeeves, which I recognised of the ‘well done, good and faithful’ variety. They were clearly no more fan of this son of an obscure corn chandler than Jeeves or I was. When Jeeves said he’d shuffled the Comte off to Buffalo, I hadn’t imagined he done it with such vim, but then I couldn’t blame him, either. The Comte was a louse of the first order. Bin him with the rest of the rubbish, said I.

M. Carrège cleared his throat. “Your association with Mrs. Kettering—"

“We are men of the world,” the louse interrupted warmly. “I do not deny the affair. I do not deny the rendezvous. I do not deny the letter.” He gestured to the missive that Jeeves had so carefully restored, which was now lying on the desk.

“But you do not have in your possession the letter from Mrs. Kettering that Mister Jeeves claims to have delivered to you,” said M. Carrège.

The wall got a haughty ‘Let them eat cake’ look that it probably didn’t appreciate, being a wall and of the people.

“I do not retain such things.”

“And you did not make any further contact with Mrs. Kettering? You did not re-board the train later?” pressed M. Carrège.

“How could I?” the so-called Comte exclaimed, gesturing to his foot. “I sought medical attention for my injury, and as I was too pained to even drive my own car, I was forced to seek out a sympathetic friend to chauffeur me back to my villa in Antibes.”

I said a prayer that the sympathetic friend didn’t own any Vatican cameos or similar heirloom gewgaw of which she was overly fond.

“We shall need the details of where in Paris you sought medical attention, if you please.”

I knew what they were after. I’d read that story, too, where the invalid is up hopping about when no one is looking, taking a hatchet to all and sundry.

The interview concluded, and we were all dismissed.

* * *

“Monsieur Jeeves.”

Jeeves and I halted on the steps of the police station and turned toward the voice.

Out of the darkness hobbled the ghost of Marie Antoinette’s own Tiny Tim. You might not have thought that one could limp menacingly, but this louse, not worth the Mechlin lace he wasn’t flicking, managed it.

He and Jeeves exchanged a heated volley of French too rapid-fire and fruity for one who languished in the Esker-vous-avez stage, but soon Jeeves had had enough, or so it seemed, for he turned.

The Comte hurled a thick threat in surprisingly elegant English at Jeeves’s back.

“Half, Monsieur Jeeves, of the takings. Or I walk right in there,” he lifted a crutch and pointed to the glass doors, through which keepers of the peace and concerned citizens were ebbing and flowing “and tell them what I am lacking—”

_WHAM!_

Pugilism lost a fine boxer when Jeeves decided to go into service. The son of an obscure corn chandler fell like an underdone soufflé. But then the rozzers, those bees who are never around when you need the strawberries pollinated, but always seem to pop up at the picnic hour, swarmed.


	10. Chapter 10

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Warning for accidental/purposeful self-drugging that only someone like Bertie could manage.

I don’t know if you’ve ever spent the night in a foreign land wondering what was to become of your friend, lover, manservant, and general fixed-point-in-a-changing age who was himself passing said night in durance vile for socking a louse-shaped bit of Brie who ought to have been binned before the party even commenced, but if you haven’t and the opportunity arises, I’d say give it a miss. Book yourself on the RMS _Titanic_ , double-cross Al Capone, or simply take up the nearest fork and stick it in your eye. Any of these options would be bliss by comparison.

For the first hour after the _gendarmes_ arrested Jeeves for assaulting the Casanova who called himself the Comte de la Roche, I threw my weight about and got nowhere. In the second hour, I decided to perform the Dance of the Seven Veiled Bribery with results same. By the third hour, I was simply pacing like a caged tiger in some kind of purgatorial _salon_ of the police station until a young man appeared, addressing me by name.

The stripling wasn’t wearing a uniform, but I’d seen him emerge like young Lochinvar out of the west, viz. from whence Jeeves had been hauled off in handcuffs by the constabulary.

Once he had my attention, the lad stood quite still with his arms hanging awkwardly by his sides. I had the impression that he was about to recite “The Boy Who Stood on the Burning Deck.” That curious form of torture being well-remembered from my own youth, I cheesed the caged tiger routine and readied myself to play the part of the rapt audience, or perhaps even prompter for one never forgets a lash given so oft and so young.

“Monsieur Jeeves requests that you return to the hotel and rest.”

The youth pronounced each word slowly and carefully and, I might add, quite properly and for his efforts, he received a smattering of applause and full marks for elocution. But as far as substance, the shot wasn’t on the board.

“Tell Monsieur Jeeves I issue a  _nolle prosequi_. I am Mary’s lamb.” And since I had the phrase on the tip of my tongue and when in Nice, one should do as the nice do, I added in the lad’s tongue, “ _J’y suis, j’y reste_.”

The boy’s face squiggled as if the ink had just run dry in his nose. Then he glanced at the inside of his shirt cuff.

“All will be resolved tomorrow. Monsieur Jeeves is relying on your nerves, your back and spine, your brain. He will see Mary’s lamb in the morning.”

Message delivered, the young Hermes legged it.

Monsieur _Jeeves_!

Jeeves had no choice, of course. The police already knew his name. Therefore, when he became an overnight guest of the law and order branch of the Gallic Republic, he could not take a page from my book and have himself registered as the prisoner Trotsky or Gatsby or even George Bernard Shaw—more’s the pity.

_C’est la vie, mais oui, mais oui._

The poet Lovelace says that stone walls do not a prison make, nor iron bars a cage, but what does he know? From where I was sitting they seemed to be doing a dash good job keeping my linnet right committed. And since I was an army of one, storming the Bastille didn’t seem like a viable option.

I looked at my watch. It was nearing the Cinderella hour, and since there was no better treason, stratagem, or spoil to adopt, I did as bid and rolled like a carriage back to the pumpkin patch.

* * *

When I arrived at the hotel, I went straight to the smoking-room and got on the outside of a pair of dry martinis in quick succession. Then when the Johnnie at the piano decided to take a breather, I was allowed, for a small gratuity, to assume ivory-tickling responsibilities.

I’d made my way through a somber “All Alone” and a melancholy “I Find a Broken Heart Among My Souvenirs,” and was just about to morosely intone the second verse of “Someone to Watch Over Me” when I was told my services were no longer required due to complaints of too many salty tears in the cocktails.

Having no heart for the casinos, I was forced to do what I’d been dreading, that is to say, return to the room upstairs.

There is no Slough of Despond like a hotel suite that is as silent as a tomb when it should be ringing with the music of trousers being ironed, soda and brandy swaying cheek-to-cheek in a tumbler, back-of-the-head-bulging books being read, and masters being respectfully scolded for white mess jackets and red cummerbunds and other assorted sartorial misdemeanors.

I exchanged the raiment, which was by then showing signs of the night’s strain, for a clean shirt and pair of trousers, electing to forego pyjamas in case someone knocked, bringing the good news from Ghent, and I had to hurry to the station to collect Jeeves.

Barefoot and collarless, with the gent’s chemise hanging on me like a fellow Drone who just needed a fiver to see him through ‘til next Wednesday, I haunted the room like Marley’s ghost. I didn’t even bother buttoning my cuffs. Heresy, I know, lax in the extreme, guilty as charged, but in that bleak moment, it really did seem that ties did not matter, all the doo-dahs invented for fastening one’s clothes about one’s frame did not matter.

Without Jeeves, what was the bally point of it all?

I crawled atop the bed and turned my face to the wall.

But Time’s a great healer and Nature does, after a fashion, adjust itself, and after about half an hour of prostration, I decided to pick myself up and piece myself back together.

Jeeves was relying on my nerves, my back and spine, my brain.

Capital.

My nerves were shot, my back was that of the camel awaiting the last straw, my spine most closely resembled that of a jellyfish, and my brain had, from the cradle, or so the world told me, been a non-starter.

But Jeeves was relying on them.

And I couldn’t let him down.

I got up and began to pace.

And think.

And the more worn the path in the carpet became, the more it seemed that, despite Jeeves’s assurance that the arrival of Rufus Van Aldin would bring a resolution to the whole matter, it was a rather ugly bit of Wotwotleigh for an Englishman like the pride of the Woosters to burn midnight’s residue wringing his proverbial hands and waiting for the United States Marines to swoop in and save the day.

As highly improbable as it seemed, I knew what I had to do: I had to solve the mystery of the Blue Train.

I pivoted and was immediate struck by a stab of regret when I saw _DEATH ON A TRAIN!_ resting on the bedside table, where Jeeves, with a touch of the vanished hand, had thoughtfully placed it. He’d left a pen and penknife beside it, too, as if I’d want to indulge in a bit of ex-libris calligraphy or old-fashioned page-cutting.

I plopped the corpus down on the bed and took up the rhapsody in blue, wishing I’d made time to read more than the first paragraph and hoping to find an illustration, like the one of the Earl of Bubonic viewing the body, something which would provide if not aide or inspiration, then perhaps comfort.

It might have been my imagination, but I had the notion that even my literature was affected by this ruddy predicament. I mean to say, _DEATH ON A TRAIN!_ much like the sobriquet that wasn’t yet on the nameplate, didn’t look half as smooth and shiny as it had just two days and a dividend ago.

I started at the end and immediately realised—with the gut-wrenching horror of the blue-blooded, blue-cover-loving bibliophilic bear of the Goldilocks story—that someone had been writing in my book!

Not someone. Jeeves! Impossible to mistake that miniscule, careful, Lilliputian clockmaker’s script. He’d filled the last two pages of the book and the back cover with notes. And they weren’t notes about any fictional death on a train. It was evident to even the casual observer that he was trying to work out this business of the death of Ruth Kettering.

He’d made a list of suspects: Googly, Mirelle, the Comte de la Roche, Mason, even Pop Van Aldin had been included and an X, I suppose to represent the unknown train robber or robbers.

Then he’d made a list of key points: the cigarette case, the four auburn hairs in the rug, the disfigured face, the rubies, the story about leaving the maid behind in Paris, the Victoria Station bag snatching.

Now usually whenever I get to part of a detective story where the author draws out a plan, you know X marks the body, here’s the High Road, there’s the Hall, yonder the Moor where the Bitterns Boom, etcetera, I skip it, but the only time I’ve ever caught Jeeves looking over my shoulder when I’m reading one of these goosefleshers is when a sketch of that sort come up.

And here, I saw that Jeeves had drawn his own. The route of the train from Calais to Nice on the right side of the blank page and a kind of timeline, running vertical to the page, on the left.

Now this was the stuff to give the troops!

All I had to do was to get my five cushions and an ounce of shag and sit down with Jeeves’s brain-attic _writ small_ and think the thing through.

My mission clear, I found every gasper that Jeeves had packed and a couple of ashtrays and set to work.

But I soon found that sitting under the bodhi tree wasn’t my own seven percent solution, so I got up and started to pace. I set the book on the table, propped open to Jeeves’s notes, and passed back and forth as I smoked.

I went through every moment of the journey, every event, trying to imagine when the murder had occurred.

Ruth Van Aldin had been alive at the Gare de Lyon and dead at Lyons. Was it someone already on the train? Was it someone who boarded, then left, a sort of assassin’s ‘moving finger having writ, moving on’ affair?

After some time, I myself moved on, relying on my smoldering golden-leaf ‘counsellors cunning and silent, comforters true and tried’ as the poet Kipling called them, to aide me as I considered each of the suspects, one by one, weighing motives and means and psychologies of the individual.

I found my thoughts being guided by Jeeves’s hieroglyphics, the underscoring, the question marks, the arrows, the boxes. If the reason for the disfigured face was known, the whole affair might unravel. Was it rage? Or was there purpose to it? The cigarette case, too. Was it left out of carelessness, accident, or premeditation?

There was one mark, however, that I could not immediately decipher. At first, I thought it a Virgil’s gnat crushed between two pages, but I dug out my barnacle and upon closer inspection, saw the spot was definitely Jeeves-made. It was on the timeline between the Comte de la Roche’s appearance at Paris Nord and when Jeeves had knocked on Ruth Kettering’s door after the Gare de Lyon, but there was no explanation, no key to the symbol’s significance.

I rubbed my eyes, then bent over the book and looked again, straining the peepers and the little grey cells.

Then, something else caught my eye.

The book wasn’t just worn. It was warped.

“Hell!” I breathed. “If Jeeves has been reading my book in the bath, he shall be in for some discipline of the lower order!”

I ran a hand over the inside of the back cover, where the map of the Blue Train’s route had been sketched. It was elevated, or so I thought, you know, slightly puffed frog, like Jeeves gets whenever I made a fruity remark in public. Then I turned the book flat, the better to study it sideways.

Yes, it was definitely raised.

“Great Scott! Could there possibly be something in there?”

It had to be something very thin.

I patrolled the edges of the back cover with my glass drawn and gasped when I realised the western front had been breached, that is to say, slit along the interior from soup to nuts.

“Oh, Jeeves, you blighter, what have you put in my book?”

The penknife!

I fetched it and went to work.

I have a delicate hand when the occasion calls for it, and I am a patient man, but after a while, I was forced to admit that I needed a different tool for extracting the paper, for what was secreted in a slit that had about as much give as a Colney Hatch waistcoat could hardly be anything else.

I plundered the medical kit for a tiny pair of pinchers, you know, the kind used to cast out the mote out of thy brother’s eye.

I must confess that, at this point, I became a bit distracted from my purpose. Imagine my surprise when I discovered a small packet in the medical kit labeled ‘Jeeves’s Special.’ I peered inside, contents appeared to be a fine white powder.

Ah, ha! I knew that those Specials of Jeeves’s were more than meat sauce, raw egg, and tabasco! This was the secret ingredient. Well, well, well. The night may not have begun with a man and a woman in a garden, but it was certainly ending in revelations.

I put the envelope back where I’d found it and resumed my work with the book.

Finally, I got the something out.

It was a single sheet of paper folded inside an unsealed envelope. Both envelope and paper were the kind provided by the Compagnie Internationale des Wagons-Lits for passengers on the Blue Train.

My heart sank as I read.

_Dear Dad,_

_Ever since I left London, I’ve had a horrible feeling of something—something that is coming to me very soon—that I can’t escape. If you’re reading this, that something has happened._

_I’m entrusting this letter to Mister Jeeves. He and Mister Wooster have been so kind to me, trying to make me see sense, the way that you always do. I know that they will do everything to make sure you get this._

_You were right. About Armand. About Derek. About everything. I see that now. I want to start fresh, start new. I’ve been so foolish. I’m sorry that I’ve been so stubborn._

_Dear old Dad. I’ve always loved you, but I never knew until today how terribly fond of you I am. No matter what happens, I’ll always be_

_your Ruthie_

I read it thrice, then slid it back into the envelope and the envelope back into the book.

Nothing mattered.

Notes, timelines, maps, clues, red herrings, the lot.

To hell with all of it.

I threw the book on the pillow and sat down hard on the edge of the bed. Then, perhaps, for the first time in my life, I did like the chappies in films and plays and buried my head in my hands.

Poor Ruth.

Poor Ruth with her sad heart, who had stood in tears amid alien corn.

Stood amid alien corn.

And died.

There was nothing for it but for a soft-hearted _preux chevalier_ who’d once won a prize for Scripture knowledge to imitate the grandest line from the New Testament.

And so, yes, Bertram wept.

I had no notion of how much more time the nightingale had left on his shift, but I turned off the light and fell sideways, not caring in the least that my head hit the book as tired Nature’s sweet restorer took hold of me.

* * *

I dreamt of her, of course.

Ruth Kettering.

I saw her face, ephemeral, rippling as if reflected on water.

I saw Jeeves’s notes, standing up like stalwart signs on the side of a road. No, it wasn’t a road. It was a track, a track where the big sapphire-blue iron stallion snorted and puffed and hooved up clouds of dust, pulling its luxury cargo toward the sea.

And, suddenly, I knew.

I put my hand to the pillow and found the book, still resting beneath my head, I felt along its pages then to its binding, a hard ridge of pointy vertebrae. I woke, or maybe I didn’t, and lunged for the pen where Jeeves had left it. Without turning on a light, I scribbled on the pages, which pages I didn’t know and didn’t care. I scratched words, phrases, wispy fragments of thought before they disappeared.

I had it!

But I couldn’t keep it. It was fading far too fast.

Then it was gone.

Gone!

Suddenly, there was a knock at the door, a loud, impatient _rat-a-tat-tat_ of a second or third attempt.

I got up and threw on my dressing gown. The lark was on the wing. Rosy-fingered dawn was curling its thick digits through the crack in the drawn curtains.

I made haste, like a roe or a hart, upon the mountain of spices, thinking that whoever lurked without might be bringing news of Jeeves, but hope was dashed when I learned was news _for_ Jeeves, specifically a telegram from Jeeves’s uncle. The message ran as follows:

ANSWER TO QUERIES. ONE MOST LIKELY M. PAPOPOLOUS ANTIQUE DEALER BASED IN PARIS VERY RECENTLY ARRIVED IN NICE. SUSPECTED BY POLICE OF BEING RECEIVER OF STOLEN GOODS, ESP KNOWN FOR RECUT RESET OF GEMS. TWO, POSSIBLY THIEF KNOWN AS THE MARQUIS SUSPECTED IN SEVERAL GEM ROBBERIES ENGLAND, FRANCE, US. LITTLE INFO AVAIL AS TO IDENTITY. UNCLE GOBY.

When you are a Bertram of Very Little Brain, which I was at that moment, lots of words bother you. And so it was with this telegram. I couldn’t make sense of it. But then I checked my watch and realised I needed to get ready to return to the police station and, if Providence was kind, get my ‘well done, good and faithful’ out of hock.

I had a stab at shaving but found myself so muddled by the dream and the before-dream puzzling, so fatigued by the long night and early morning, and so wholly lost without my Boswell that I quickly abandoned the task.

I ordered some tea and toast. Then I ordered some coffee.

I washed the marmaladed toast down with the vital oolong, but the pride of the Wooster still found himself unequal to the tasks before him. Then I remembered the trove of the previous night.

“Pieces of eight, indeed,” I squawked, doing my best Capt’n Flint as I sluggardly flapped to the medical kit.

I couldn’t remember a time when my soul had been more tried. The spirit was willing, but the flesh was sorely weak. It was, therefore, past time for all good pick-me-ups to come to the aid of the party.

And thus, I dumped the entire contents of the Jeeves’s Special envelope into a mug of coffee and stirred.

I had to hold my nose to get it down. It was as bitter and foul as Aunt Agatha that time I refused to take her son Thos to the Old Vic to see that Russian play where nothing happens until the end of Act Two when Grandpapá hangs himself in the barn.

Then it hit me.

POW! POW! POW!

“HULLO-HULLO-HULLO!” I cried as I threw my arms in the air and ran in circles ‘round the room.

Jeeves was relying on my nerves, my back, my spine, and my brain!

Huzzah!

Well, my nerves were pulsing with enough volts to light up London Bridge, my back was gyrating like an un-deaf adder, my spine was tingling like it was auditioning for the chorus of _Ask Dad_ , and my brain was in a first-class berth on an Express bound for the stars.

I let out a whoop that might have been heard ‘round the world.

This was a Very Special Special! And I was a very special Bertram—the invincible kind!

I bounded into the bath for a shave and a splash ‘bout the good ol’ soap and water, then I bounded back into the room to upholster the Wooster frame. Then I happened upon something in the drawer where my collars and whatnots were stashed.

A pale lavender-coloured rosebud.

I stared, then touched it warily, not entirely certain that it wasn’t a figment of my cerebellum, which was, at the moment, still tap dancing ‘round my skull.

The rosebud was silk. And it was, I remembered, Jeeves’s favourite flower, something to do with his Grandpapá, the one who I hoped hadn’t hanged himself in a barn at the end of Act Two.

I took the flower as a portend of triumph and sang, “AMOR VINCIT OMNIA!” as my body twisted in a joyous, if slightly convulsive, fit.

I donned the gent’s outerwear like a tornado preparing to have its photograph taking with the guards at Buckingham Palace, only pausing to carefully, well as carefully as I could manage with fingers that were spasming like electrified beetles, affix my love’s favour in my buttonhole.

I took a moment to do pastoral dances, with the hat rack as partner until, of course, one of the curtains butted in, and then I pounced upon the small valise and quickly filled it with a clean shirt, toothbrush, and comb for Jeeves as well as my monocle, that salve Jeeves had put on my shiner, the penknife and tweezers, _DEATH ON A TRAIN!_ and Jeeves’s telegram.

Then I fixed the _whangee_ with the special knob after, of course, cackling to myself about special knobs for a period of time whose length Jeeves would probably have described as ‘injudicious.’ The silver globe is a bit ostentatious, if that’s the word I want, but it also affords the surreptitious exchange of significant glances between Jeeves and self in public and I decided it might prove valuable if we were permitted to be proximal at any point in the hours to come.

I flipped the sign hanging from the doorknob to _S.V.P. ne pas déranger_ , then legged it to the bank to acquire the necessary funds to negotiate Jeeves’s temporary release. Imagine my ecstasy when I opened my mouth to express myself in the Gallic tongue, and every word that sprang from my lips was perfectly pronounced, exquisitely enunciated, and correctly conjugated! Or perhaps I was telepathic, or clairvoyant, or something-something along those lines because the clerks and tellers and other minions seemed to jump-to right spritely when I shouted my commands.

Then it was half a league, half a league, and half a league onward to the police station.

Oh, but God was in his heavens and all was right with the world, for after being catapulted from queue to queue and window to window, I finally found the place where I could, for a substantial fee, guarantee Jeeves’s appearance in court and his freedom from captivity.

And then, there he was, looking not quite the dewy violet as was his wont, but a night in chokey will take the bloom off the heartiest of flora.

Regardless, I sprang like an Aberdeen terrier who’d just heard his favourite bone hum the first strains of his favourite sea shanty.

“Jeeves! Jeeves! Jeeves!”

“Are you quite all right, sir?”

“Fit as a fiddle! Why do people say that? Why are fiddles fit, Jeeves? Why, why, why, Jeeves? Why not cellos or flutes or those thingagummies that the monkeys in lift attendant kit play? Do you know why, Jeeves?”

“I really couldn’t say, sir.”

His gaze lingered a bit longer than it should have.

“Don’t stare, Jeeves. Not the done thing.”

“Apologies, sir.”

“Well, anyway, I brought some things, what? Thought you might want a change of shirt, what? What ho, what ho, what ho! Begorrah, faith and be gob, what?”

“That was very kind of you, sir. I believe that there is a public toilet of which I might take advantage.”

“Tally ho!”

He led me like a pack of hell-hounds along the corridor from whence I’d come. I followed him beyond the door and balanced the valise on the edge of the wash basin.

Jeeves saw to his dentition, his coiffure, and his battered knuckles while I paced behind him.

“Did you rest well, sir?”

“No! Yes! No! Well, a bit! But mostly I was up, excising the little grey cells, solving the mystery, of course. Well, two, in fact. I figured out what’s in those Specials of yours.”

In the mirror, I caught Jeeves’s eye, he looked sicklied o'er with the pale cast of thought then gulped like a stricken bull pup when the bite of chop is too much for it.

“I found it in the medical kit. Don’t worry, Jeeves. Your secret’s safe with me.” I threw a saucy wink at the mirror and twirled the _whangee_ for good measure.

“Sir! How much of the preparation did you consume?”

“All of it, you big lump, poured it right in the morning mug of Java-sluice and threw it down the hatch!” I cried, sloshing him on the back like we’d served in the peninsula together.

“Oh, _sir_. That was most injudicious. A grain or two, at the most—”

“Nonsense, Jeeves.” I did a pirouette worthy of the Sugar Plum Fairy, then skipped to the door and jammed the _whangee_ against the doorknob. “ _This_ is injudicious.”

I launched myself at him, planting a long, hard kiss on that ‘nature, sweet in tooth-powder and maw,’ but Jeeves wasn’t shocked, no, he gave as good as he got, then pulled back. His very corpus shuddered through a whispery, breathy, almost Lillian Gish-swoony ‘sir.’

“Can’t be helped, Jeeves. I feel like I could conquer something very large and difficult to conquer! Like Mount Everest. Or your prick.”

I kissed the side of his neck and listened to the music of his ragged breath.

“Or the Turks,” I added.

“I would not wish to suffer as Tita at Missolonghi, sir,” Jeeves replied with a soft spasm about the mouth. “But, uh,” he took my hands in his and placed them on my own chest and gently pushed me from him, “I should like a fresh shirt.”

“Shall I—?” I suggested, waggled the ol’ eyebrows suggestively.

“No,” he said quickly, then offered a quick apologetic peck on the lips. “Injudicious.”

“All right,” I said and turned my back in a manner most _preux_.

“What is the other mystery solved?” he asked conversationally.

“Good Lord, Jeeves. A night in durance vile has left your egg positively poached! Why, the mystery of the Blue Train, of course!”

“You solved it, sir?”

“Don’t sound so surprised, Jeeves,” I replied, looking over my shoulder to get a nice, long drink of the Jeevesian torso. “I eliminated the impossible and was left with the highly improbable. It’s all right here.”

I produced _DEATH ON A TRAIN!_

“I must apologise, sir,” began Jeeves, contritely, “for defacing your property. I shall make restitution—”

“Never you mind that, my poppet. The solution to the whole affair came to me in a dream. Like Joseph. Or Einstein. Or one of those chappies.”

Jeeves sank his carefully-folded chemise into the small valise and looked over my shoulder.

“Wait a minute,” I said, gazing dumbfounded at the page. “WHAT?!”

“I am not a sophisticated judge of artistic merit, sir, but it appears to be a rather crude rendering of a phallus and scrotum.”

I shrieked and turned the page.

“Two more,” pronounced Jeeves, “in miniature, and, if I may say, belonging to a slightly more hirsute personage than the first.”

I flipped forward. Nothing.

I flipped back. Nothing.

Nothing!

But three pricks!

“I had it, Jeeves! I had the answer to everything. Ruth Kettering came to me in my dream and told me who killed her. I wrote it down! Or I thought I did. Oh, my sainted aunts!”

I smacked the lemon and felt my invincibility seep out as through the rift in a lover’s lute.

“You had a troubling day followed by a troubling night, sir, and I must apologise, too, for adding to your troubles by my act of violence upon the gentleman who calls himself the Comte de la Roche. It was—"

“I know, Jeeves. No doubt it was rather satisfying to give that libertine a bit of ol’ velvet hand in the iron glove, but I know it wasn’t a crime of passion. Not really.”

“Sir?”

“Well, it’s a sight more difficult to blackmail a fellow when he’s in prison, what?”

There was a with-child pause while I waltzed to the door and retrieved my _whangee_.

Jeeves was doing a rather good impression of a fish when I did another pirouette and huffed.

“I’m a prick-doodling half-wit, Jeeves, but I’m not stupid. There’s not a shred of violence in you, and you’ve been provoked by far worse than our friend, the Petticoat Pimpernel, what? I knew you must’ve had a good reason for wanting to be locked up. Doesn’t mean that _I_ wanted you locked up. Don’t gape like a newt-fancier, ol’ sport.” I set the glint in the squinter and gave a toreador’s flourish. “Come on, the game’s still afoot, what?”

“Indeed, sir. May I say, sir, that I never get your limits.”

“Carve it on my tombstone, me boy. Let’s go! Oh, wait. A telegram arrived for you this morning.”

I stopped and handed it to him.

Jeeves scanned the message, nodding.

“You’ll explain when we get back to the hotel?” I asked.

“Absolutely, sir.” He handed the paper back to me and I tucked it in the valise.

But as is the way with things, just as you are about to see daylight and breath your first lungful of freedom’s air, something comes along to cosh you, or as the Americans say, blackjack you, behind the ear. Our cosh took the form a stripling’s cry.

“Monsieur Jeeves!”

Jeeves and I stopped and turned.

It was Hermes, the messenger lad of the previous evening.

“Monsieur Carrège requires you and Monsieur Wooster.”

“Oh, Jeeves. Do you think something’s happened?”

The stripling had the answer, more sobering, though I hadn’t thought it possible until that moment, than the thought of Aunt Agatha in bathing dress.

“The American has arrived.”


	11. Chapter 11

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Warning for a bit of non-graphic violence and a bit of Bertie whump.

I got my first hard squeeze long before Rufus Van Aldin ever had the chance to massage the fin in his patented ‘show ‘em who’s boss’ fashion.

When Jeeves and I turned the corner, there was the spoon herself, Mason the not-maid, sitting on the very edge of a wooden bench outside the Examining Magistrate’s lair. Her back was straight as an arrow but the rest of her tittered, like a kettle that wasn’t on the hob quite right.

At the other end of the pew was a rather nondescript youngish, oldish man, well-groomed and well-dressed, but looking a bit too uncomfortable in his own skin.

Perhaps what was unsettling both was the roar coming from within.

“EITHER SHE’S MISTAKEN OR SHE’S LYING! IT WASN’T ME!”

Googly.

Only an entitled, but not-yet-fully-titled Englishman throws his weight about like that.

“Sir?” asked Jeeves.

“What?”

“I wish to compensate young Master Felix for his assistance in delivering my messages last night.”

“Oh, of course.”

I passed Jeeves an assorted bit of the ready and, leaving him to reward the troops, plunged into the fray.

“I told Ruthie before she left that you’re rotten through and through! And if you killed my girl, you’re going to be praying for the hangman’s noose. I’ll be a lot less painful than what I have in store!”

“Monsieur Van Aldin, please!” cried a Gallic voice which I remembered from the previous day.

My _rat-a-tat-tat_ on the half-open door seemed to startle the company out of their scene, which apparently called for silent, manly glaring amongst the entire ensemble cast.

Googly was the first to his feet. “Wooster!” he exclaimed. “They think I killed Ruth! The maid said she saw me in Ruth’s compartment!”

“You were in Ruth’s compartment,” I remarked coolly. “I saw you, too.”

“She says she saw me at the Gare de Lyon, you half-wit,” he retorted.

I let the jibe roll off me like the last straw off a camel’s back. People who bring their mistresses along to spy on their wives really shouldn’t throw stones.

“The Gare de Lyon?” I echoed. The Wooster brow furrowed like a bed of vegetable marrows in the spring.

I was intrigued.

This new development, as they are often called in the _roman policiers_ , threw, at minimum, a monkey’s paw into the timeline that was currently vandalising the final page of my rhapsody in blue. It might also lead to a new name being added to the list of suspects.

I didn’t dare cast a glance at Jeeves, who had, in his custom, shimmered in unnoticed, but I felt his interest as piqued as my own.

“Apparently, Ruth saw me, then decided to leave Mason maid behind in Paris,” said Googly with undisguised contempt. “Goodness, what a lark! The days when my wife would leave a maid behind for me passed, I’m afraid, a very long time ago.” He punctuated this last bit with a sardonic snort that I was forced to admit had a touch of musicality to it.

“Excuse me, Monsieur Kettering,” interjected M. Carrège, tapping the open file before him, “to be precise, Miss Mason’s statement is that she saw a tall, dark man in an overcoat and hat who resembled you.”

Googly turned and bore down upon M. Carrège, who was still seated at his desk. “But it wasn’t me!” he snarled. “And that’s not my cigarette case! And—for the very last time—I—DID—NOT—KILL—MY—WIFE.”

He spoke as if he considered the whole of the party present to be of the Wooster intelligence quotient, which I could’ve told him was a misstep.  

Unsurprisingly, Rufus Van Aldin sprang to his feet. Captains of industry aren’t known for taking ranygazoo sitting down.  

“But you’re in right pretty spot, son, now that my girl’s dead. Her money, plus the rubies—”

“I didn’t like Ruth, and her death helps me more than a little, but I didn’t kill her. If I killed her, I wouldn’t need the rubies. And if I took the rubies, I certainly wouldn’t dirty my hands killing her!”

Well, Googly was a bad ‘un, but he was a bad ‘un with a point. And I couldn’t help but remember what had been made of Ruth’s face after her death. Employing what Jeeves always calls the psychology of the individual, I’d concluded last night that Googly might try to rearrange my features of interest with his fist and, I’d been forced to acknowledge, he might have rearranged Ruth’s, too. But it would always be in a moment of rage, like this one. To do so _after_ he’d strangled her seemed, well, not his style.

Googly turned back to M. Carrège. “Are you charging me or am I free to walk out of here?” he spat.

“You are free, Monsieur Kettering,” said M. Carrège, then added with a touch of cool menace, which is standard issue amongst beaks from Bosch Street to Côte d'Azur, “for the moment.”

“Wooster.”

And I might, just might, have been honoured at having a snort of my very own if the blighter hadn’t clipped my shoulder as he oiled off.

Rufus Van Aldin spared a single huff of disgust at the spectre leaving the feast, then he turned to Jeeves, who’d been standing all the while at my side, a monument to impassivity of Kipling’s ‘If’ breed.

“Mister Jeeves. Mister Wooster,” said the captain of industry, extending what was, in the circs., the most somber of glad-hands.

“Mister Van Aldin,” Jeeves began, “to say that Mister Wooster and I are sorry for your loss does not adequately express the depth of our sorrow.”

I, for my part, made sympathetic noises in my throat.

Van Aldin brushed away our sympathetic gurgles and heartfelt sorrow with an abrupt gesture. Then he gave Jeeves a grim smile. “I’m told you were arrested last night, Mister Jeeves, but in my opinion, they ought to have pinned a medal on you. I’d have given that swindler everything you did and then some.”

“The man who calls himself the Comte de la Roche is an unscrupulous character, and he preyed upon your daughter shamelessly, as he has prayed on many others,” replied Jeeves.

“Did he kill her, though?” asked Van Aldin. “Or was it my wretched son-in-law? Or the dancer he’s been cavorting with?” He shook his head. “My poor Ruthie, my poor girl. Those rubies. I regret the day that I first thought of giving them to her. If I’d known she’d have taken them with her, leaving herself so vulnerable…”

He rubbed his face with his hand.

“Monsieurs, please, have a seat,” said M. Carrège softly.

There being only two chairs, Jeeves made to take a watch by the door, like a guard at Buckingham Palace, until the captain of industry insisted that the ‘well done, good and faithful’ be provided a throne of his own. Felix, that proud but childlike form, born to rule the storm, was just outside the door with a mop and bucket was called for, instructed, and he soon produced the goods.

“I am pleased to see you again, gentlemen,” said Van Aldin, once we were all seated in a crescent before the desk of M. Carrège. “I have been wanting very badly to hear what you can tell me about Ruth. With Mister Carrège’s permission, I’d like to hear your story again.”

M. Carrège gave a nod.

I launched into my tale, the same one I’d told before.

“She changed her mind, the poor girl!” lamented Van Aldin. “But it was too late! Damn it!”

Like the last of the Woosters, Rufus Van Aldin was to be a man who favoured the caged tiger routine, for with the oath sworn, he jumped to his feet and began to pace.

I wasn’t certain how much latitude M. Carrège would allow a meddling amateur, but if bricks were to be made, I needed a bit more clay.

“So,” I asked, “the maid was left behind in Paris?”

“Oh, yes,” said Van Aldin, pausing mid-stride. “My private secretary, Major Knighton,” he made a gesture toward the door, “ran into her in Paris at the Ritz two nights ago. Mason said Ruth met a man in the corridor as she was about to leave to walk about on the platform at the Gare de Lyon. She invited this man into her compartment. Then Ruth gave Mason some money and told her to go to the Ritz and await further instruction. She said the man was tall and dark and that he wore a dark overcoat and hat.”

I glanced M. Carrège. He didn’t seem ruffled by Van Aldin offering the exposition.

 _Quelle Lestrade!_ I mused. This cove was rather cooperative, as magistrates go. Thus, the decision to press the matter was, for me, the work of a moment.

“And Mrs. Kettering didn’t leave the rubies with her maid?” I asked.

Van Aldin and M. Carrège shook their heads.

I inclined the onion thoughtfully and marrowed the brow vegetably.

“Well, your daughter must have been with this man inside the compartment when I knocked on her door, as it was just after the train left the Gare de Lyon.”

“She didn’t want you to see him, whoever it was. The problem is,” said Van Aldin, “the most likely candidate is out of the running. Mason didn’t mention anything about the man she saw being on crutches or having a bandaged foot or limping, and I suspect that is something that would be difficult to miss.”

“He could be faking,” I suggested. “The Comte is not what he seems.”

M. Carrège grunted. “We’ve confirmed through our own sources that the Comte de la Roche’s injuries are genuine. It seems unlikely that he could disguise them so soon after they were inflicted, and Mademoiselle Mason insisted the man she saw was not limping.”

“So, the mystery man could only be my son-in-law, whom you saw enter my girl’s compartment before Lyons or…”

Van Aldin’s voice trailed off, then he resumed his march and his oration, doing a fine impression of the Bertram of a few hours prior, _sans_ legion of gaspers.

“…but I suppose he needn’t have killed her himself. It might have been his mistress, who could have slipped in her compartment unnoticed or,” Van Aldin shrugged, “it might be unrelated, and the real culprit is an unknown train robber who boarded, killed her, took the rubies, and may never be found. _Oh, God_.”

I recognised the foul tartan of frustration, confusion, and despair in Rufus Van Aldin’s voice.

M. Carrège puffed up a bit. “Monsieur Van Aldin, I assure you, we will do everything to—”

“I know,” Van Aldin said curtly.

A silence fell upon the room, and only a few eloquent specks of dust stirred, dancing slowly like wayward snowflakes about the ether.

Time, as the poet chappies are so fond of telling us, stood still.

It’s funny what thoughts come to mind in such a moment. Mine were three. First, that there was, indeed, a tide in the affairs of Woosters and that, if any fortune were to be had, that is, if any justice were to be reckoned for Ruth Kettering, it must be taken at the flood.

And that flood was now.

Second, how clever was that daring late Victorian gentleman, no, not the one who saw and observed, but the one who said ‘Money lost. Little lost. Honour lost. Much lost. Pluck lost. All lost.’

Pluck, I had.

Pluck, I had because—and here the boy, the one who’d won a beautifully bound-volume of unremembered but, no doubt, ecclesiastically-sound title, who’d become a man who knew Shadrach, Meshach and Abednego as if they were members of his club, fell back on the milk-teeth poetry learned at his mother’s knee—

_yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil: for Jeeves art with me._

And my staff was a comfort, for I tapped it thrice on the floor of the Examining Magistrate’s office, then peered directly into the silver globe.

And met Jeeves’s gaze.

And in the history of looks, there has never been one said ‘for whither thy goest, I shall go’ more than that of those beautiful blue e.’s, inverted, of course, as inverted things often go, by a well-polished knob.

Well, like the sweet prince said, the play’s the thing, so on with the show.

M. Carrège was closing the file on his desk and Rufus Van Aldin was harrumphing in a ‘where’s my coat kind of way’ when I fished the barnacle out of its case and set it in my eye.

“Might I trespass on a moment of your time?” I asked, looking like Solomon just before he suggested splitting the baby like the last ham sandwich. “A bit of an experiment?”

M. Carrège looked puzzled but nodded.

“Mister Van Aldin, please ask Miss Mason and your secretary to come inside.”

With the entrance of two more, the space soon became crowded. I got to my feet, as did Jeeves and Rufus Van Aldin, and we moved the chairs to the edges of the room. I set my valise on the seat of a chair and propped the _whangee_ in front of it, then said,

“Miss Mason?”

“Yes, sir?”

“You said that you saw a tall, dark man in a dark coat and hat. That’s a fairly general description. I was wondering if it might have been me.”

I did a pirouette, offering my back to her scrutiny.

“Oh, no, sir!” she said, primly. “You’re far too fair.”

“Very well. How about,” I looked at the young man, “Major Knighton, is it?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Would you…?” I extended my hand.

Moving with a slight limp, he took my place and turned.

“Oh, no, sir! He’s far too lean.”

“What are you getting at, Mister Wooster?” growled Van Aldin.

“One last indulgence, please. Jeeves, if you would.”

Jeeves did as bid.

“Oh, well!” she said, flustered and turning a fetching shade of mauve. “Oh, I can’t be certain, of course, but, um, well, yes, it might have been someone like him. Yes, yes, it did look an awful lot like him.”

“With all due respect,” said Jeeves solemnly. “Miss Mason is mistaken. I was never in Mrs. Kettering’s compartment.”

I might have worried that my Watson wasn’t following until the moment that Jeeves took two very careful steps toward the OP side of the stage, the better for me to hit my mark opposite him on the Prompt side.

And then we were face-to-face.

But we weren’t.

Not really.

All the world’s a stage and, Jeeves and I, London’s typical man-about-town and his gentleman’s personal gentleman, who love each other to depths and breadths and heights well-hidden, are far too adept at wearing the masks.

I glared at Jeeves, my gaze as hard, cold, and sharp as the thrust of a rapier. Then I faced the audience, well, the part of the audience that mattered, and waited.

“How long have you suspected, Mister Wooster?” asked Van Aldin, his voice the temperature of Pittsburgh steel in January.

“Since Victoria. There are some people who inspire trust just by who they are...”

As if with swords drawn, Jeeves and I began to circle each other very slowly.

“…and some people who trust way too easily, even though they know better,” I continued, my voice was soft and low and, yes, I’ll admit, that of the charmer, charm he ever so sweetly.

“Good Lord,” breathed Rufus Van Aldin. I thought I heard M. Carrège make a similar but of course, more romantic because it was French, noise.

“You can be forgiven, Mister Van Aldin. Americans are a bit less skilled in these matters of servant classes. And, after all…”

Jeeves held my gaze, his expression never more chiseled stone, and he stepped to the one side and I, to the other.

Step.

Step.

Until I hit my mark.

“…your daughter was taken in, too,” I said, quickly pivoting to thrust my dish at the spoon, “by a lady’s maid who nothing more than a common thief!”

Mason shrieked. Then she fainted.

I heard M. Carrège and Rufus Van Aldin jump to their feet. I saw Major Knighton advance with concern creasing his visage.

The _preux chevalier_ , however, was unmoved. And his gentleman’s gentleman stirreth’d not.

“I know maids, Mister Van Aldin, and I know actresses, and from the moment I saw this lady, I knew she was sorry excuse for the latter.” I poked the crumpled lump with the toe of Oxford. “Really, I’ve seen better at a preliminary dress-rehearsal in Schenectady…”

Now I haven’t learned all of life’s lessons, but I do know that a man can often insult a maid with impunity but when you besmirch one of the deadlier of the species who is sopping with artistic temperament, a fellow’s bound to get a bit of the ol’ Cyril Bassington-Bassington right in the family jewels.

Mason the maid may have fallen to the floor, but the bird that phoenix from the ashes was a thespian Fury scorned.

She went for the gonads, of course, they always do, for some reason, shrieking like a banshee.

There was a bit of commotion.

And the whangee did not sleep in Jeeves’s hand, but very soon the smote spoon bolted for the door.

But she didn’t get far.

Thanks to a certain Casabianca and his mop.

Jeeves and I watched as the rozzers swarmed ‘round the cursing heap of dark wool.

“Jeeves did you tell young Master Felix about Lady Eldritch’s maid who polished the linoleum so well that the cork mat slipped, and her mistress fell and broke her leg and the gardener had to get a ladder and come through the window?”

“I didn’t have to, sir, as the universal language of currency proved more than satisfactory”

“Thank you, Jeeves,” I muttered under my breath. “And I’m sorry for what I said and implied.”

“Not at all, sir. You were splendid.”

“But it’s not over, is it?”

“No, sir. Not quite.”

I turned my head and looked him squarely in the eye. And the poet chappies can talk all the rot they want about ‘two minds with but a single thought’ because right then, right there, I knew what Jeeves knew and what Ruth Kettering knew.

And I pledged myself to be the _whangee_ that would not sleep in their hands.

“You had me going, Mister Wooster!” said Rufus Van Aldin with a chuckle when he, Jeeves, Major Knighton, and I were seated once more ‘round the Examining Magistrate’s throne. “I thought you were accusing Mister Jeeves, not realising you were setting a trap for Mason! But you were right. Ruth trusted her, let her into her home and her life, completely unaware of the danger.”

M. Carrège shook the lemon thoughtfully. “But…”

“She was an actress,” I said. “And I spoke slander when I said she wasn’t any good. Quite the contrary. She fooled everyone but the most observant.”

I caught Jeeves’s eye in the silver globe of my stick and let one corner of my mouth twitch.

“I knew that Mason wasn’t a maid. And I knew that she’d only been with Mrs. Kettering a couple of months. She applied for the post around the time you would’ve been shopping for the Heart of Fire. Word would have gotten out.”

Rufus Van Aldin nodded.

“But…” repeated M. Carrège.

“Mason wrapped Ruth’s body up in one of the carpets,” I continued. “She wore Mrs. Kettering’s clothes and hat, added a bunch of curls, and, being a good actress, fooled the conductor who made up the bed. She allowed herself to be seen by those returning to their berths after dinner. She made up a story about leaving her maid behind in Paris. She made up a story about a tall, dark man. She imitated Ruth Kettering’s voice when she spoke to me through the door. Then, when the train was quiet, she dressed Ruth Kettering’s body and put it back in the bed and changed clothes again. This time, she became the young man I saw striding up and down the platform at Lyons. She was hidden in the second compartment when Derek Kettering entered before the train arrived at Lyons and on a different train altogether traveling north when Mirelle followed after him.”

“A neat theory, Mister Wooster,” said M. Carrège. “But wholly implausible. We have this man’s testimony that Miss Mason was in Paris two nights ago.”

Like Hamlet and his skull, I addressed the shiny orb of my _whangee_ and ignored everything and everyone beyond the footlights.

“How pipped were you?” I asked, making a sucking noise like I’d got a stray sultana lodged in the front bicuspid. “When you realised the rubies you’d stolen—and murdered for—were fake?”

I turned my head and gave Major Knighton the full Baron von Schistosomiasis through the soul’s porthole.

“WHAT?!” roared Rufus Van Aldin.

But I wasn’t going to stop.

I couldn’t stop.

Until every idol in the temple of Baal was smashed.

As smashed as Ruth Kettering’s face.

“And how big of a _chump_ do you have to be to leave your monogrammed cigarette case behind? Did we put a crunch in your schedule, a wrinkle in your plan, with our little love’s charade, Major Knighton—or would you prefer I use your pathetic sobriquet, _Le Marquis_? I mean, if you ask me, this country is full of nothing but people who put preposterous airs and fake titles. I mean if anyone can call themselves a Marquis or Comte or a—”

“You’re very mistaken, Mister Wooster,” said Major Knighton evenly enough, but his hands were shaking.

“You’re stupid, Knighton. And evil beyond the dreams of avarice. I could’ve told you not to throw your lot in with an actress, me boy. She’s in little room somewhere, giving you up right now. And _you killed that girl for a few red stones_ —"

I felt a sudden hot sear as if Jeeves had been uncharacteristically careless with the iron and chosen to tackle the gent’s sleeve whilst the gent’s arm was still in it.

And I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again: it was worth a wound—it was worth many wounds—to witness my Assyrian become an Angel of Death and spread his wings on the blast.

As I slipped to the floor, I watched with awe as Jeeves breathed in the face of the cruel thief as he passed my _whangee_ upon the peashooter that had been drawn from that blighter’s pocket.

And my heart only sank when I heard the sorrowful sound of a monocle being crushed beneath an ill-placed heel.

* * *

“It’s nothing, Jeeves,” I insisted. “It’s a mere scratch. Stop fussing.”

I passed a very brief sojourn in the police station infirmary, and I’m quite certain the staff threw a right jolly soiree when they finally saw the back of me, for Jeeves was a cross between a nightingale of the Florence variety and a mother hen of the nightmarish variety.

He’d refused to let me carry the valise or even the whangee. But I had to put both my feet down and both ears back and do my best imitation of Balaam’s ass when the invalid’s chair arrived.

“Great Scott, Jeeves! I was more injured that night I thought the hat rack was a burglar.”

“Nevertheless, sir.”

We exchanged significant glances.

Finally, two representatives of the Gallic constabulary appeared and escorted Jeeves and I back to the lair of M. Carrège.

Rufus Van Aldin had his head in his hands.

“Monsieur Wooster, Monsieur Jeeves,” said M. Carrège. “Please, have a seat. You have the gratitude of the French Republic. The thief known as ‘Le Marquis’ has been of interest to us for some time.”

I looked at Jeeves and nodded. It was time for the ‘well done, good and faithful’ to tell his tale.

“Mister Van Aldin, when your daughter confided that she was enamoured of the gentleman who calls himself the Comte de la Roche, I was concerned.”

Van Aldin looked up, his ginger brows drawn.

“I knew of the Comte,” said Jeeves. “He was the cause of much pain and suffering on the part of the daughter of my former employer, a young lady much less worldly than your daughter. I felt Mrs. Kettering was, as she believed herself, to be in danger. I took my promise to you at Victoria Station seriously. I knew the Comte’s ways and when I escorted him off the train, I surreptitiously removed from his person the imitation rubies with which he intended to swap for the real ones.”

“Good Lord!” breathed Van Aldin.

“My plans were, admittedly, muddled. First, I intended to show Mrs. Kettering what the Comte had in mind, but she was so distraught, I feared that she would not believe me or perhaps change her mind and leave the train in Paris and go to him. So, I decided to switch the imitation stones for the real ones. The morocco case that holds Mister Wooster’s monocle is identical to the one that held Mrs. Kettering’s jewels. It was a simple sleight of hand to make the exchange.”

I told you at the beginning that Jeeves was a bally magician, didn’t I?

“When she refused to open the door to Mister Wooster before dinner, I became very worried. My final understanding was that she was to contact you in Nice, and so, and here you may or may not believe me, my intention was to return the rubies to her when we reached our mutual destination. It was never my intention to keep them from her. Regardless of my intentions, I took a grave liberty.”

Jeeves looked at me, and I took my cue.

“Major Knighton boarded in Paris, after the business with the Comte. He and Mason killed Mrs. Kettering and he helped her arrange the body in the carpet where the auburn hairs were found. Knighton took the case with the fake rubies and dropped of the train. Mason stayed on and played her part until Lyons. The whole thing hinged on the disfigured face. They couldn’t take the risk that the conductor would realise that the dead woman wasn’t the woman he’d spoken to the night before when he was making up the berth.”

“I thought Mason was working alone but since Knighton was her alibi, he had to be involved. You mentioned to Jeeves at Victoria that Knighton had, like Mason, also joined your employment around two months ago.”

“I could’ve sworn Knighton didn’t angle for the post. You should’ve seen his face when I offered it to him!” cried Van Aldin.

“Jeeves ruined their plans when he twisted the Comte’s ankle. They didn’t have their scapegoat. They might have succeeded in pinning it on Derek Kettering, but I think Mason sensed that Jeeves was on to her and jumped at the opportunity I gave her.”

I looked at Jeeves, and he took his cue.

He produced _DEATH ON A TRAIN!_ and the penknife. The latter he pressed into the hand of my good arm, the former he perched on his knee.

The spine of Bertram Wooster might be that of a jellyfish, but the spine of _DEATH ON A TRAIN!_ —which I slashed, soup to nuts—dripped with rubies.

They fell into my hand, and I gingerly passed them to Rufus Van Aldin.

He stared and then shook the bean and said softly,

“My Ruthie’s price was above these.”

I handed the penknife back to Jeeves, and he slit the back cover of the book.

“Your daughter wrote two letters, Mister Van Aldin, one for the Comte and one for you.”

Rufus Van Aldin blinked, then took the envelope. He shoved the gems in his pocket absentmindedly and tore open the letter.

“Thank you, Mister Jeeves. Thank you, Mister Wooster,” he said as the tears rolled down his face. “This means more to me than all the precious stones in the world.”

* * *

Of course, that wasn’t the end, but that was the end of the corking part. Jeeves and I spent another couple of hours giving our statements over and over to the French police, and when we finally returned to the hotel, it was dusk.

The moment the door closed, I was in his arms.

“I’m sorry. I’m sorry, I’m sorry,” he murmured into my hair. “I took a liberty, I acted so rashly, and you might have been killed—"

“S’okay, Jeeves. You always take liberties.”

He drew back.

I let my smile be my umbrella. “Those purple socks, for starters. Then there was the vase you smashed. And the white mess jacket you ruined. And all of the clothes you took it upon yourself to rid me of before I surrendered them. You think you know what’s best. And most of the time, you do, but sometimes knowing what you think is best for other people can land you in the royal _bouillon_ —just like being a half-wit can.”

He went all taxidermied amphibian and vowed, “I’ll drown the book.”

“No, you won’t. It’s that scorpion and frog gig. But speaking of drowning, would you like a bath?”

The question seemed to drag Jeeves out of his grimpen mire. As he looked about the room and observed all that the supernatural force that had been Hurricane Bertram had wrought earlier that morning, his expression took on the horror of an Edgar Allen Poe character.

“You first. There is much to be done…”

“No, you first,” I insisted. “You spent a night in chokey. I only lost a pair of sleeves.”

I stepped back and lifted my bandaged wing.  

Jeeves tended to his ablutions while I sat on a low stool by the head of the tub and played in the bath-sluice with the yellow rubber duck which is always among the master’s effects when he travels.

“You were splendid.”

“So were you, Jeeves.”

There was a pause, the charged kind that always settles right before a summer storm or a confession Jeevesinal.

“Today you were,” Jeeves tilted the onion, “the embodiment of a childhood hero. When I was a fanciful young man, I wrote a letter of admiration and sent it to 221B Baker Street.”

I gave him a cheeky wink. “Then we’re a pair because when I was a stripling, I wrote a pretty fruity missive to the Amateur Cracksman. Tell me, Sticky Fingers, are you going to launch a career as a gentleman’s personal gentleman thief?”

Jeeves laughed. “Only if I have a very bad Goodwood, sir.”

Surprisingly, the urge to break out in song didn’t strike until much later when I was gently curled against Jeeves, my clipped wing propped up on an assembly of pillows.

“You’re the cream in my coffee.

You’re the salt in my stew.

You’ll always be my necessity.

I’d be lost without you.”

Jeeves required no prompting or persuading to rumble a reply.

“You’re the starch in my collar.

You’re the lace in my shoe.

You’ll always be my necessity.

I’d be lost without you.”

* * *

The song was still in my heart and on my lips three nights later when I was tickling the ivories and humming along at a piano in a less-trafficked corner of a Monte Carlo casino.

“ _You’re the sail in my love boat._

_You’re the captain and crew._

_You will always be my necessity._

_I’d be lost without you_.”

“Well done, sir.”

“Oh, hello, Jeeves. How have the tables been treating you this evening?”

“Fairly well, sir. Though Lady Luck is notoriously fickle.”

“We have much to celebrate tonight, do we not?”

“Yes, sir. That the charges have been dropped is a great relief, but if I may make an observation, you seem a bit low-spirited.”

“I saw Miss Grey tonight.”

“Ah, yes. I saw her, too, with Mister Kettering.”

“He says she’s the one for him, and she seems quite smitten. I don’t know. It isn’t my business, but I can’t help but think about Ruth Kettering and wonder if the second Mrs. Kettering will end up as miserable as the first. And I like Miss Grey, Jeeves. I like her very much. Her picture is what you would find in the dictionary under ‘good egg.’”

“Perhaps Mister Kettering will be inspired to reform, sir.”

“Perhaps,” I conceded. “Or maybe she’ll have a jolly bit of fun and keep on going, enjoying the wind in her hair and the tang of sea breezes.”

“One never knows, sir.”

We exchanged significant glances.

“I have to say, Jeeves, I’m finding it difficult to get in the spirit of this holiday. It’s a bit of that ol’ ‘And when they win a smile from me, they think that I forget’ bilge. I don’t really want to go back to the metrop, but I feel like an uninvited spectre at the feast here.”

“Perhaps a holiday is in order.”

“We’re on holiday, Jeeves.”

“I was thinking of the Isles d’Or, sir.”

“Isn’t that where the Comte was going to take Ruth?”

“Precisely. It is very far from the maddening crowd. A few days of solitude and rest might restore our _joie de vivre_.”

“You feel it, too?”

“I feel, sir, what you feel, sir.”

“All right. I’m going to play them ‘our song’ before the chappie comes back from his break. In the morning, book the excursion and pack up all our cares and woes.”

“Very good, sir.”

“ _It had to be you_ …”


	12. Chapter 12

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The End.
> 
> I had planned a third porn chapter, but the muse is dead. If you'd like to read about the naughtiness that Bertie & Jeeves get up to on a secluded island, then stay subscribed to this story and if the muse ever returns, I'll tack it on as a thirteen chapter to this fic.

“I’m ready, Jeeves,” I said as I tucked myself into my sleeping bunk.

“Indeed, sir?”

There wasn’t much room in the narrow compartment to valet, nevertheless, Jeeves managed it.

“Yes, Jeeves, after that exceedingly ripe holiday within a holiday we enjoyed on the Isles d’Or…”

“Yes, sir.”

“…which we wisely brought to an abrupt end when we discovered Major Plank was in our midst…”

“Yes, sir.”

“…then a return to Nice and receipt of the telegram that announced the imminent arrival of my good and deserving aunt along with half the Wooster family tree to the sunny Riviera…”

“Yes, sir.”

“…and seven weeks of shenanigans, I am finally ready to return to Ol’ Blighty.”

“As, I confess, am I, sir.”

“You’re looking bronze and fit, Jeeves.”

“As are you, sir.”

“Thank you.” I sighed. “Putting the mystery of the Blue Train behind us, what?”

“As you say, sir.”

“You know, Jeeves, I think I’m ready to read that rhapsody in blue.”

“Are you quite sure, sir? I could furnish you with a new copy when we return to London. Lamentably, the publication is not yet available in France.”

“No, this one will be fine. I can overlook the defacement.”

“Very good, sir.”

Jeeves produced the volume, which had been wrapped in kind of Shroud of Turin and entombed ever since the French police had returned it to me.

“Will you require anything else, sir?”

“No, Jeeves, thank you, but, uh…”

“Yes, sir, the adjoining door is unbolted should you need anything.”

“Thank you, Jeeves. Good night.”

“Good night, sir.”

* * *

“…oh, you’ve got to be kidding. Jeeves!”

I sprang out of bed, threw a dressing gown ‘round my shoulders, and pushed into Jeeves’s compartment, waving _DEATH ON A TRAIN!_

“Do you know what the sleuth’s name is, Jeeves?”

“Sir?”

“His name is Tarberm Wotrose!”

“Really, sir?” said Jeeves, with a twinkle in his eye. “How unfortunate.”

“Yes, he’s Lord Oxenesque.”

“Is that seat in Shropshire, sir?”

“He has a chauffeur named Sleeves.”

“Interesting. I once knew a second footman whose surname was Waistcoat, sir.”

“You wrote this bally book!”

“Yes, sir.”

“Why didn’t you say anything?”

“I thought the dedication would give it away, sir.”

“No one reads dedications, Jeeves!”

I flipped to the front pages and read the dedication.

_To B. W. W._

_It had to be you, wonderful you._

“Oh, Jeeves,” I sighed. “So this is what you’ve been doing this in your leisure?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Are you working on another?”

“I had no plans to write another, sir, having felt I’d exhausted my muse with the inaugural work, but since our journey to Nice, I’ve had cause to re-think that decision.”

“The Ruth Kettering business?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Well, will you do the honours?” I asked.

Jeeves smiled and took the book from me. “It would be my pleasure, sir.”

He bent his knees. I settled myself at the far end of the bunk.

“ _The day began as days usually did, with a song in the bath_ …"

**Author's Note:**

> Thank you for reading!


End file.
